Against the odds
by 01cheers
Summary: Their arc in the film is achingly beautiful, but my inner fix-it junkie insists on a warmer and fuzzier headcanon scenario. Rogue One, Cassian/Jyn, also featuring K-2SO. Cross-posted from AO3.
1. into the unknown

I really, really, _really_ cannot believe I am writing _Star Wars_ fic.

I was an obsessive fan in my teens and early twenties, ever since watching _Empire_ (saw it before _Star Wars,_ years after the original trilogy came out) and reading Tim Zahn's brilliant sequels, but the Extended Universe books (the good ones, such as the Zahn trilogy and Michael Stackpole's X-Wing series …and, admittedly-YMMV, Barbara Hambly's Children of the Jedi) were so much fun that I had no cause to write fic. Those books are still my old-fangirl headcanon when it comes to post-ROTJ events, but I loved _Rogue One_ as a great chapter in the early Rebellion tale (and, I confess, it, loved Cassian as an "imperfect" good guy). It is thrilling to see so many people writing Jyn/Cassian stories, both canon compliant and canon divergent, and I am dying to read them – but before I do, I have to get this pesky plot snippet off my mind.

And finally… I'd have loved for Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi to stay alive, but with the three of them getting killed the way they did, it would have been beyond my powers of denial.

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.

The fireball is the first thing she sees when the elevator doors pull apart with a screechy shudder. A twisted vision of a golden sunset, it glows on the horizon, unbearably bright, magnetic, inescapable. She stands and stares, her body and mind frozen. _This is it_. She never gave much thought to how exactly she would die, having spent her life surviving… then again, all things considered, this may not be the worst option. It's bound to be quick. Maybe it won't be too painful. If only –

"Jyn!"

She tears her eyes away from the deadly beauty to stare at Cassian. Surely he knows they are doomed; they both saw the black column of smoke rising from the landing pad where _Rogue One_ had been, their only escape route. At best they can make it to the beach, steal a few seconds of peace from approaching death before facing it together.

"Let's go!"

The urgency in his voice makes her obey; he still has to lean on her, dragging his injured leg at an awkward angle, but the direction they are going in is his decision – not forward to the beach that she is drawn to, but sideways across the cavernous hall.

It takes her squinting eyes a few seconds to discern any shapes outside after the ride downward in the dark elevator, but halfway into their trudge across the concrete floor, she sees it.

A Lambda-class shuttle sitting on a landing pad, just outside the side entrance, its formation lights flashing, landing ramp gaping open.

Trust an intelligence officer to notice what she, in her hurry to get the transmission going, had missed from the top of the tower.

It must have got there right after they did. It must be Krennick's, she realizes belatedly; he must have come here looking for the comm trail after her father admitted his noble deception. _Of course_. She was too busy avoiding the shots, and too focused on reaching the transmitter dish, to have given it a moment's thought. She is lucky Cassian had the presence of mind to have kept an eye on things in between getting busted up.

She stops and turns when she no longer feels the weight of his arm on her shoulder.

"Cassian, come on!"

He is crouched on the floor, hand gripping his injured knee. His face is ashen, his eyes wide and unseeing, brimming with pain.

"You go on, Jyn. I'm slowing you down. When you get to the bridge, hit the launch sequence –"

" _Come on!_ "

Her voice is so shrill and desperate that it spurs him into motion. He gets back on his feet, though he immediately has to steady himself against her side, and she half leads, half drags him the remaining hundred meters to the shuttle ramp.

"I'm not leaving without you," she exhales, by now unnecessarily, as her hand hits the ramp release, pulling it up. Cassian does not bother to get up, sliding down the rising ramp to the floor inside the shuttle.

Before he can muster the strength to respond, she pulls the blaster out of his belt holster, thumbs off the safety and dashes forward to the bridge, praying to the Force that she does not run into the crosshairs of a squad of armoured troopers.

The shuttle looks eerily empty. When she has reached the bridge without seeing a single human or droid, she doubles back.

Cassian, still sitting on the floor where she left him, hardly registers her arrival; his eyes are still unfocussed, his forehead filmed with sweat, his breath ragged. She knows that the most effective way to get him to move is to bark orders at him, but cannot bring herself to do it. Well, at least one thing is certain, and oddly reassuring: whether they make it off Scarif or not, their fates in these moments are fused together.

"Come on," she entreats him a third time, much softer than before. "Let's get this thing off the ground before the blast wave hits." It works; he scrambles up to his knees and hurtles forward, right hand grabbing blindly at the bulkheads as he makes his way to the bridge. He clearly avoids using his left arm.

By the time she catches up with him there, slumped in the pilot's seat, and drops into the co-pilot's seat by his side, they are already up. It looks like Cassian is a competent enough pilot to fly on reflexes no matter what state he is in; and it looks like he has flown a Lambda before, seeing how his hands skim over the controls with practiced efficiency. He still favours his left arm, and she sees the reason when she glimpses his shirt sleeve burned through by a blaster bolt; but apparently he does his best to ignore it.

They are at the edge of the atmosphere when she takes a sideways look out the illuminator on the co-pilot's side in time to see the macabre blossom reach the archive tower; for an instant, the grey spike flashes a blinding white before dissolving into the spreading fireball. A few seconds too late, and they would have been dead.

"Strap yourself in."

Cassian's voice may have grown shaky, but his flying is still smooth and confident. She turns back toward him as her hands reach for the harness, but her gaze is transfixed mid-way by the spectacle before her; instead of the black void of space, she is looking at the carnage of a battle. A huge Nebulon frigate cruiser torn in half; the mangled carcasses of two colossal Star Destroyers hanging in orbit, stuck together like a bizarre rotating sculpture; the broken circle of the shield gate, huge chunks of it ripped out, floating away; the remains of several X-wings, a couple of Y-wings, and what looks like swarms of charred TIE fighters slowly spinning about, their pilots dead or dying. A Corellian corvette streaking off into the distance, the one still-intact Destroyer powering up its ion engines chasing after it, a lumbering Rancor in pursuit of a tiny fire-lizard.

And looming above all this, the ghostly globe of the Death Star, drawing the remaining Imperial fighters to it like a swarm of deadly insects seeking refuge in their nest.

She barely had time to follow Cassian's command when he veers away from the carnage, bearing sharply on a vector that puts them at a maximum distance from the Imperials as quickly as possible. But she does not need to point out what he surely knows; they cannot outrun pursuit. The moment anyone notices and hails them, they are finished.

"Jyn?"

She snaps out of her worry to glance back at him. He looks a lot worse for wear, but still in control.

"Yeah?"

"Ever had to calculate a hyperspace jump?"

There is no reason why she should have, but she still feels painfully inadequate. "No."

If Cassian is disappointed, he does not show it; his gaze is fixed on the display panel as his long fingers tap the input keys. "Hold this," he points to a lever on her side of the control panel a few seconds later. "On my word, pull it forward."

She does not doubt his decision for an instant, but curiosity prompts her to speak up.

"What are we doing?"

"Reverting to the input coordinates of the last known entry vector," he mutters. Hearing no acknowledgement from her, he explains, still watching the readout, "Going into hyperspace back to wherever this shuttle came from."

"But-"

He answers her question before she has had a chance to ask it. "Whatever that place is, the jump will most likely bring us into high orbit. I'll have a few minutes to calculate a jump from there before we're noticed, but if we hang around here we're dead for sure."

"You said it," she mutters back, seeing the first red beams of turbolaser fire flash past them.

"Ready?" Cassian calls to her. She hazards another glance at him, and her throat tightens with a burning ache; she cannot figure out for the life of her how he is still holding together, leave alone flying.

"Ready," she answers, as steadily as she can.

"Three… two… one… _pull_."

The pinprick stars lengthen into brilliant lines before these, too, meld together into the familiar mottled blue.

And then, just as she breathes a shuddering sigh of relief, a new voice speaks up out of nowhere; an unfamiliar slow monotone, artificial and unsettling… but the words are thrilling despite themselves.

"You know, this may turn out to be a really short jump."

.

TBC

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	2. taking stock

_A saga_ this story may not be, but, to paraphrase Master Yoda and old Star Wars taglines, _continue it does_.

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" _As I told you 22 times before, Captain_ …" the disembodied voice drones on, but Jyn cuts it off with an excited greeting.

"K2! Is it really– "

It is Cassian's turn to stop her mid-sentence with a warning hand.

"K?" Cassian asks with a set face, unable, or unwilling, to filter caution out of his tone. She cannot see how it could possibly be anyone else _but_ K, but for an intel operative, being suspicious must come with the territory.

" _Yes, Cassian?_ "

The monotonous delivery does not suit K at all; kind of ironic, considering that he is a mechanical being.

"When and where did I find you?"

" _You mean when you first found me, Cassian?_ "

"Yes."

" _You and your partner, Mako Towani, found me at Kuat Drive Yards, Imperial calendar year 12, week 27, at nineteen thirty four standard time._ "

"How long ago is that?" He must be too worn out by pain to make sense of the Imperial calendar.

" _Standard Coruscant time?_ "

"Yes." Had Cassian been his normal self he would have snapped; instead, the word comes out as a sigh.

" _Eight years, eleven weeks and one hundred and six hours ago._ "

Cassian looks a good deal less concerned by now, but apparently is not quite finished with the test.

"What were we doing?"

" _You and Mako infiltrated the shipyard impersonating Imperial cadets on a study trip from Carida Academy. You later told me it was one of your first missions with Alliance Intelligence. Your real task was to steal Victory-class Star Destroyer plans and technical specifications. You were on your way back to your shuttle when you saw me in power down mode on a repulsorlift trolley awaiting maintenance for a faulty joint, and decided to steal me. Mako reprogrammed me and sixty-one weeks later you imprinted me with his voice when he–_ "

"All right, I believe you." By now there is no mistaking the relief in his voice.

" _I am glad to hear it, Cassian. And I am glad you took the time to verify my identity. Jyn, you should be more careful before trusting unfamiliar voices._ "

She laughs despite herself. Cassian may have wisely chosen the cautious approach, but K's peculiar direct manner was pretty unmistakable from the outset.

As if on cue, K picks up where he had left off when Cassian had first interrupted him.

" _But as I told you 22 times before, Cassian, doing a blind reverse-coordinate hyperspace jump has a very high probability of fail–_ "

"You know I don't care about the odds, K."

" _I know, Cassian. But it does not mean you are right ignoring them the way you do._ "

Cassian makes a credible attempt at an eye-roll, presumably for her benefit as it is pretty obvious K cannot see him.

"I've survived this far."

" _You and Jyn would both be dead if it hadn't been for me ordering the pilot crew and guard squad away from this shuttle._ "

"How in the galaxy did you manage that? And where in blazes are you?"

Jyn can guess K's answer to the first question, but the second has her baffled, too.

" _I checked the arrival log when we reached the data terminal at the vault, and it occurred to me that this shuttle could be a quick way to reach Rogue One if the railcar link to the landing pad should fail. I then generated a message in the system calling the pilots and guards away_."

"Good thinking."

" _I was going to tell you about it but did not have time. I am glad you noticed it on your own. .As for where I am, it depends on what you mean_."

"Which part of _where are you_ do you find confusing, K?"

" _My body is still on Scarif._ "

"Then how are you– " Jyn jumps in.

" _When I received data showing that Director Krennic was coming up with reinforcements, I re-ran the probability calculation and saw that I had a zero-point-zero-two percent chance of survival in my original body. So I uploaded a full copy of my memory to the data bank on board this shuttle as a backup plan, with a self-erase trigger if Imperial troops discovered me. I hoped that you and Jyn would be able to join me, but in any event I thought that a fifteen-thousand-in-one chance of being found by Alliance forces was better than zero_."

"Good thinking indeed," Jyn echoes Cassian's words. "So your mind is inside the shuttle computer?"

" _It is inside the memory databank. It was the only way I could upload myself_."

"So you can run isolated processes that are entirely supported by your internal programming, but can't launch commands without a prompt from the shuttle's system?" She knows it to be the case, but checks on the off chance of better luck.

K's answer confirms that _that_ would be pushing it luck-wise. " _Exactly. I am able to process data independently but it would require your input and you will need to manually copy the output to the shuttle mainframe. I have a full set of Lambda-class shuttle schematics in my memory and can do a hyperspace calculation for your next jump if you launch my navigation module and feed the coordinates into it, but I cannot fly the shuttle for you_."

"It's still good news," she reassures K. It is great news, considering that an hour earlier she and Cassian had thought he was gone for good. "Maybe I can put together a programming patch to create a shortcut for you–"

" _It's too risky, Jyn_." She may be slightly put out by K's objection – she did not earn her reputation as a mean hand at hacking for nothing – but when K continues she has to admit the truth in his words. " _Especially while we're mid-jump. If the system detects an incompatibility it may suffer a critical error. You can do it when we land, assuming we eventually do land. Until then I'll do my best to support you the way I can_."

"As soon as we get someplace with a repair shop, we'll get you into a droid body."

" _I appreciate your thoughtfulness, Jyn. It would be a real drag being forever trapped onboard this Imperial bucket_." K's voice may be gone – just for now, hopefully – but he is still the same.

Before she has had time to enjoy the moment, it occurs to her that Cassian has not said a word for a while. She takes a sideways glance at him; his head is resting against the high back of the pilot's chair, his eyes are open a tiny fraction but he looks oblivious to the goings-on.

"Cassian?"

He does not reply. She unbuckles the harness, turns to fully face him, and reaches for his arm – thankfully, the one closer to her is the uninjured right.

"Cassian, can you hear me?"

He stirs at her touch but it still takes him a second to respond, and when he looks up at her he has trouble focusing on her face.

"What've I missed?"

"I was just chatting to K. You all right?" He obviously isn't, but there are several grades of that.

"I think I've got a concussion," is Cassian's verdict, delivered in a resigned grumble.

" _Of course you got a concussion,_ " K jumps in, in the same uninflected mechanical drone, but she can perfectly imagine the scolding tone he would have wanted to use. " _I am surprised you only just realized it. I could hear it in your voice from the moment you powered up the system here, but humans cannot detect it in themselves until much later. Did you take a fall?_ "

"You bet I did." The way he says it, a couple of seconds later and slurring the words, confirms both Cassian's own and K's diagnosis.

" _How high?_ "

Another pause. "A few storeys. When Krennic shot me at the vault–"

"You should lie down," Jyn cuts in. "K, where are the pilot's sleeping quarters on a Lambda?"

Cassian speaks up while K is searching for the answer. "I don't think… I can."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't… think I can get up."

"If you mean the knee, I can help you walk."

" 'S not just the knee… I think I messed up my back."

It figures, of course; even with the way he had tried to slow down his fall grabbing at the support struts, the way she saw him hit a durasteel beam halfway down was bound to have caused serious damage. They are incredibly lucky that between the adrenaline and her insistence, he made it to the shuttle at all.

" _So you have a concussion, a broken back –_ "

"I don't think it's broken, K," Cassian cuts in.

" _It may not be broken but you still cannot move_ ," K counters, quite sensibly. " _What else?_ "

"A busted knee," Jyn supplies.

Cassian tries to shake his head, which immediately makes him wince. "Nothing major," he argues when he has regained a measure of composure, "just torn ligaments… I think." He says it as if it were really good news.

"And a blaster wound to the left arm," Jyn finishes.

"Enough with the autopsy report, the two of you. I'm still alive, you know, and I've been through worse," he argues, weakly. She does not really want to know how much.

"I'm sure you have," she mutters. "K?"

" _Yes, Jyn?_ "

"Forget the pilot's quarters. Tell me where I can find a medpack on this rusty can."

" _Just a moment, Jyn_ …" It only takes him a couple of seconds but it feels like ages. " _Aft starboard cargo bay, a crate labelled_ emergency supplies _in Basic_."

"Thank you." She scrambles up from the co-pilot's chair as she says it, and heads into the shuttle's dim interior.

She has hardly had time to locate the durasteel crate when she hears an insistent beep echoed throughout the shuttle; she grabs the handle on the medpack lid and heads back to the bridge.

.

TBC

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This chapter may have been a bit of a necessary-evil drag setting up the events that will follow, but I promise that subsequent ones should be livelier, and now that it is out of the way (and I have finished typing up the detailed plot and checked my ancient Star Wars sourcebooks by way of research), I should be able to post new chapters quicker. I'll try to type up the next one tonight, though it may take a while – it is quite a bit longer and very chatty :)

And I can hardly express my gratitude to everyone who followed, liked and commented. It totally makes my day, and since my last writing fandom was tiny by comparison, I am overwhelmed in the best way possible by your interest and appreciation. Thank you dear readers, and I hope to keep you entertained!


	3. leap of faith

I kind of suspected that this next sequence was too long for a single chapter; so here is its first half, and I'll post the second half as a new chapter later today ( tomorrow in EST terms).

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"What is it, K?" she yells as she sprints onto the bridge.

" _It is a realspace re-entry alert_ ," K's makeshift voice answers. " _On a Lambda-class shuttle it is default-programmed to go off one standard minute before coming out of hyperspace_."

She breathes a sigh of relief; she was expecting a system failure or a proximity alarm.

"Cassian?"

It is a vain attempt; by now he looks well and truly out of it.

"K?"

" _Yes, Jyn?_ "

"Pull up your files on emergency first aid medications."

" _Ready_ ," he says a second later, before she has even managed to undo the latches on the medpack lid.

"What should I give him? A painkiller, what else?" She finally gets the box open and rifles through the contents; a few self-adhesive patches, an injector pistol and an array of capsules, bundled-up bandages, a couple of disinfectant bottles and a black wrist strap that she recognizes as a pulse monitor and temperature gauge.

" _A painkiller injection is a good start_ ," K confirms, " _Look for the blue capsules with the Athakam logo. Considering the injuries Cassian has sustained, it may be best to give him two shots at once. You can give him more later as needed._ "

"What else?" she asks after she has followed K's instruction, injecting the double dose into her unconscious companion's forearm in quick succession.

Before K can reply, the ship shudders, and she has to steady herself against the control console, doing her best to avoid hitting any of the keys, as the blue void resolves into lines that presently become stars.

She peers anxiously into the black sky.

Nothing.

No planets, no suns, no ships. Must be the spot the Death Star jumped to after destroying Jedha City as a sort of stopover point, before following them to Scarif.

So far, so good. She can return to the urgent task at hand.

"K, what else?" she prompts.

 _"Since Cassian also has a concussion, I would advise a stim patch. It may interfere with the painkiller due to their respective opposite effects, but it is important to keep him conscious as long as possible."_

"He's unconscious already," she retorts.

" _He will come around once you have applied the patch, but you will need to keep watch over him after that._ _If he goes into a coma, especially if he has suffered a brain hemorrhage in impact, he may not_ …"

"What does the stim patch look like?" She knows perfectly well what Cassian _may not do,_ and she does not want to hear or think about it until he has come around.

" _Yellow with an orange stripe_."

"Found it," she calls out a bit later. "How many should I give him?"

" _Just one. Given his overall state, it is best to keep stimulants to a minimum_." Great; between the injuries and the concussion, they are in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. " _And make sure you do not exceed one every six hours_."

"And if it isn't enough to keep him awake?" she asks as she presses the patch over the side of Cassian's neck, not so much counting on K's answer as voicing her frustration.

" _You could try slapping him if he starts drifting off. Lightly, I mean_."

"Lightly or not, I'm not doing it."

" _Well, failing that you'll have to do what you can to keep him alert and hold his attention. Talk to him, or better, get him to talk to you. It usually helps_."

"I'll do my best."

" _I noticed that we reverted to realspace_ ," K comments presently. " _Do you know where we are?_ "

"I was about to ask you the same question," she counters.

" _I will be able to tell you once you have given me the coordinates. Look for the three sets of figures at the upper right hand corner of the main display_."

"Well?" she asks after she has read out the numbers and given K a reasonable time to process them.

" _We're in Imperial space_ ," he announces, and she scowls even though it is not entirely unexpected. " _On the edge of the Outer Rim. The nearest solar system is approximately three lightyears away_."

That last part should be good news; it looks like there is no one here to spot or harass them, and with any luck they could be on the vector to Yavin so as to make it there with a relatively short jump.

" _But the jump took us in the opposite direction from the system our base is in_ ," K continues.

Well, so much for the short jump.

"What's going on?"

She is so surprised at Cassian's voice as to give a start before the relief registers. He still slurs the words, but sounds better than before, if only marginally.

"We reverted to realspace," she informs him, "and I gave you the painkiller and stim patch that must have brought you around."

"Thanks. Do you– does K know where we are?"

She answers on K's behalf, though her answer is a question in itself.

"You want the good news or the bad news?"

"The bad," he prompts. Typical, but practical.

"We're in the middle of nowhere."

"And the good?"

This time K jumps in ahead of her. " _Well, we're in the middle of_ – "

"All right," Cassian cuts him short, though he does look somewhat amused, or at least relieved. "Where _exactly_ in the middle of nowhere are we?"

K duly supplies the coordinates, and explains their position the same way he explained it to Jyn minutes earlier.

"How much power do we have left?" is Cassian's reaction to K's summary. He must be thinking about the jump to Yavin, too.

"Where do I look?" she prompts him, to save him the trouble of leaning toward the console.

Her first reaction at seeing the figure is instant concern, though in truth she knows next to nothing of the Imperial shuttle power consumption profile. "Twenty-eight percent," she announces. "How bad is it?"

Cassian's scowl is instant enough, and eloquent enough, to give her an answer. K takes a few seconds to run the calculation before delivering essentially the same conclusion.

" _It's not enough to take us directly to our base_ ," he states, and for once, the impersonal level tone is kind of appropriate. " _We have to look for a stopover point to replace or recharge the fuel cells_."

"In Imperial space," Cassian cuts in.

" _We are on an Imperial shuttle, Cassian_ ," K counters.

"We aren't exactly credible as an Imperial _crew_ ," Cassian shoots back. "How far to the nearest Outer Rim systems?"

"Give us a list of all habitable Outer Rim systems that we can reach with our current residual power," Jyn prompts before K answers. It may be a better bet than just going to the nearest one; with any luck, between her and Cassian, they will stumble on a world that may not be outright hostile where either of them might recall a friendly face.

" _Including those under Imperial government?_ "

"Including those," she confirms. Not the best option by any measure, but not all Imperial government outposts are equally zealous in enforcing order.

A few minutes pass; eventually K announces that he is ready.

"How many?"

" _Fifty seven that can be reached before our power level drops to five percent_."

"OK, bring them up," she prompts him, and reads out the names for Cassian's benefit when they start scrolling down the secondary display. "Agamar, Anoth, Atzerri, Bakura, Belsavis, Bespin, Bestine, Carratos, Dantooine, Dathomir, Dorval– wait!"

Her excited exclamation is met with a simultaneous "What?", one in a flat synthetic voice and one in a suddenly-alert one.

"Dorvalla could be a really good spot." She tries not sound too excited. Not to _get_ too excited, for that matter. "I've been there a few times. There's an Imperial government but it's pretty laid back, and it has a big busy spaceport and a mild climate. Best of all, we could get access to a bacta tank and a 2-1B," she finishes, shooting Cassian a pointed look.

"How do you know?" He does not exactly share her excitement, regardless of the bacta mention.

"There's someone there I used to work for. Well, someone I did a few jobs for, after Saw Gerrera left me to fend on my own," she corrects herself before continuing. "We parted on good terms, and last I remember, he had no intention of moving off planet. His wife is really obsessed with her looks, so she pestered him to get her a personal bacta tank and a surgeon droid to stay young and beautiful." Her voice is neutral, though her face likely shows what she thinks of that sort of preoccupation; still, on this occasion another person's vanity may be used to their advantage.

"He must be pretty well off," Cassian remarks in a non-committal tone.

"He is," she confirms. "He's made plenty of credits smuggling ryll."

"He's a Twi'lek, then?" Cassian prompts. It is fairly common knowledge that Twi'leks hold a virtual monopoly where the ryll trade is concerned.

"Sure is."

" _He's a long way from home_ ," K observes.

"And from what little I recall of Dorvalla, he chose the planet that least resembles Ryloth to settle on," Cassian adds.

"You've been?"

"No, but I remember reading a brief a couple of years ago. Was supposed to meet a contact there but we ended up meeting at another location. Looked decent enough as planets go. What's this guy's name?"

The _non sequitur_ throws her, if only for an instant.

"Nawara Olan. Heard of him?"

"No, but I heard of his clan." He makes a sour face. "And of all the Twi'leki clans, the one you picked to work for is the only one with Imperial sympathies?"

She mirrors his expression with a sour, or at least stern, face of her own. "I wasn't giving much thought to it at the time…" She pauses. After Saw had left her – abandoned her – she resolved not to give a damn about rebellious guerrillas and political leanings, so long as she could get paid. "But you're wrong on Nawara's account. His brothers, the other Olan leaders, are Imperial sympathisers, true, but he's the black bantha in the family, if you wish, and doesn't give a hoot about politics either way. He never saw eye-to-eye on business with the head of the clan so he struck out on his own and left Ryloth about ten years ago. From what I recall, he'd had no contact with the rest of his family since then."

If Cassian is surprised at her animated defence of her one-time paymaster, he does not show it. "Where does he get the ryll, then? I thought Ryloth was the only planet with large deposits– "

"That was one of the reasons he settled on Dorvalla. That, and as you say, the fact that he was looking for a planet most different from his home, I guess. He somehow found out that the minerals making up much of Dorvalla's mountain ridges, when heat treated and soaked in an acidic solution, can be used to produce synthetic ryll, as good as the highest _kor_ grade found on Ryloth. And to make things better, he found a profitable business line importing de-humidifiers into Dorvalla that provides the perfect cover for the cargo vessels he runs in and out." Strictly speaking, ryll is a mild enough stimulant with ancillary medicinal uses as not to be illegal; but ryll trade has always been restricted by its relatively short supply, and in recent years endangered by the Empire's greed that saw the imposition of prohibitive duties. It is only thanks to the highly inhospitable conditions on Ryloth that Imperials never set foot on the Twi'leki homeworld to wrest the lucrative mining business away from the locals.

"You think you can trust him?" Cassian may not sound entirely convinced by her narrative, but he seems sufficiently intrigued by it to be willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

She hesitates, momentarily unsure how much she can trust Nawara as opposed to how much she _wants_ to trust him for the benefit of getting Cassian the treatment he desperately needs. In the end she just goes for the honest answer.

"Well, one thing I know is that he's got no love for the Empire. I don't know how much I can trust him other than that, but to the best of my knowledge he bore no grudges against me when we parted. And a bacta tank _and_ a 2-1B in private hands aren't easy to come by."

"Let's hope he and his wife didn't get divorced," Cassian comments in a deadpan tone, and her mouth twitches up at the quip. "K?"

" _Yes, Cassian?_ "

"You heard what Jyn said. You have our current coordinates, and you should have the ones for Dorvalla stored in your memory. Let us know when you're done crunching the jump numbers, so we can copy them to the navicomp."

 _And let us all hope I didn't just make a big mistake_ , Jyn thinks, as the white star lines fill her field of vision a third time on this improbable trip.

.

TBC

.

I am pretty sure you remember the two Twi'leks from _Return of the Jedi_ : Jabba's cunning majordomo Bib Fortuna and the hapless dancing girl Oola who ends up killed by the Rancor. Their main distinguishing feature, apart from the orange-red eyes, consists of a pair of thick fleshy "tails" growing out the back of their heads, so-called _lekku_. The background facts for their homeworld and ryll properties and production come from _The Krytos Trap_ , one of the old X-Wing series books. To summarise the pre-Disney canon, Ryloth, their home planet, has highly inhospitable conditions, with half of it baked to a scorching heat and the other half frozen in a permanent night, and they live in artificial cave networks around the terminator line. Ryll, whose trade they control, is a mild "spice", ie stimulant / medical component. Twi'leki society follows a fairly rigid clan structure and is honour-bound to a large extent. For the most part Twi'leks sided with the Rebel Alliance, but with most of them being cunning and tough negotiators, it is not surprising that a few, like Jabba's manager, have pretty shady allegiances.

The Carida military academy and Kuat Drive Yards both come from pre-Disney canon books. The planets on the list Jyn reads out that are not mentioned in the original films also come from Extended Universe books, though I confess I got their names from a sourcebook. Dorvalla is mentioned there once and is not described in any detail, so in later chapters I sort of go to town making up my descriptions of its conditions and surroundings.


	4. keep talking

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, dear readers!

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"K?" Cassian calls out once they are in hyperspace.

" _Cassian?_ "

"How long a jump are we looking at?"

" _Approximately four hours and forty seven minutes, assuming re-entry at the programmed location. The calculation on a Lambda shuttle navicomputer tends to have a downward bias by an average of one-point-five percent, so the actual time may be between four forty three and four fifty one. Or the way you would put it, about five hours._ "

"Thank you." Cassian sends a look of long-suffering patience in the general direction of the control panel. "You could have started with that. How much residual power will it give us?"

" _Six point eight percent._ "

Cassian nods slowly instead of a reply, and Jyn does not need to hear his opinion to know what he is thinking. This jump is an all-out bet; once they land – _assuming_ they land, as K put it, on Dorwalla, they won't be able to take off without fresh cells. Even if they just stay in orbit, they will not have enough power for another jump to a habitable world.

"K?" It is her turn to query, and hopefully to be met with a less downbeat answer.

" _Jyn?_ "

"How do I access the news query function on this thing?"

" _Secondary screen, top menu,_ _select_ ancillary information, _then_ sources _where you pick_ external, _then_ subjects _where_ _you key in your query_."

"Thank you, K."

"What are you looking for?" Cassian asks as she goes through the steps.

"I want to see if Nawara's company pops up in any recent news, and hopefully figure if he's still running it from his old HQ." Of course she should have checked all this before they jumped, but Cassian kind of took over the initiative when it came to the final decision.

"Any luck?" he asks a minute later.

"Well, the company's still around." Her query brought up enough mentions of _Starfire Electronics, Dorwalla's prime climate control specialists_ to provide assurance that it is still in business. A few more seconds later, she flashes him a grin as she sees an image from a recent publicity release. "Aaand he's still there." _Whatever that means_ , she adds mentally, trying to keep her smile from fading too fast.

Then again, the upside of dealing with a covert operative is that he does not tend to get overly optimistic about things. "Whatever trouble we may run into, this means we at least have a chance. How long ago did you say you worked for him?"

"I came across him, or should I say we came across each other, soon after Saw and I parted ways, four and a half standard years ago. I needed money, happened upon someone who needed a code slicer, made my hundred credits writing a patch for him and the next thing I knew, the guy was telling me I should talk to his boss. Back then it was a real stroke of luck."

"And how long did you stick with him?"

"Just under a year. It was good work but he wanted me as a formal part of his outfit and I'm not very good at fitting in." _Except maybe now with the Alliance, but they aren't called_ rebels _for nothing_. The part she leaves out is how she was scared of the prospect of belonging to a group too soon after Saw's abandonment, fearful of getting burned a second time.

Luckily, Cassian does not call her bluff on this line of reasoning. "What'd you do?"

"Code slicing, mostly. Forged IDs and fake company credentials for his cargo pilots, ship manifests that hid the sensitive stopover points, that sort of thing. On some occasions I even hacked into Imperial customs records to give his ship fake diplomatic clearance. It worked." She flashes another grin back at him.

"I presume you were using your own forged ID and records when you met him."

"Of course." She is not sure why he is suddenly asking the obvious.

"Which name did you use?" Belatedly, the all-too-obvious question makes sense.

"The usual, _Liana Hallik_. It had the best backup trail and was good for the long haul, so long as I was careful not to get it openly connected to any of my illegal stints." Which worked just fine until it blew up spectacularly four weeks ago.

"I take it you plan to use it with Nawara now, as well?"

"Yep… seeing how I ended up in prison under it, I'll have to explain to him how I'm now in trouble, but that's the name he's known me by so changing it now won't do much good," she adds with a shrug. "What about you?"

"I'll have to think of a last name," he ponders out loud. "Cassian's a common enough name in the Expansion Region and shouldn't trip any alarms, but I need a last name that won't stand out."

"Is that where you're from, the Expansion Region?" That explains the slightly accented Basic.

He closes his eyes for an answer. "M'haeli, right in the middle of it. Haven't been there since I was a six-year-old kid."

 _I've been fighting since I was six_ , she recalls his words on the way from Eadu. Her own life has not been an easy ride by any measure, but the pain in his voice when he said it had cut through her own bitterness back then like a lightsaber blade going through durasteel.

Cassian must have seen the shadow of that recollection in her face, as he speaks up to bring her back to the present; more uncertain but less fraught. "Something short and not limited to a single world would work best."

Something that will be easy to remember, above all. She is usually good with sticking to cover stories and identities, but with all that happened in the past day or two, she is worried about getting distracted, or too plain tired, so as to undermine their plan with an inadvertent mention of _Captain Andor_.

Just then, she gets an idea. "How about Rook? Bodhi's last name, you…"

"I know," he jumps in before she has finished. "Not bad. Quite good, really. I've met a few humans named Rook on the Rim worlds so it can't be that rare, and none of them, including Bodhi, had open ties to the Alliance, so we should be good. And I'll be sure to remember it," he finishes darkly.

"Me too," she echoes with a sigh. She'll be sure to remember that name, along with _Chirrut Imwe_ and _Baze Malbus_ and Melshi, and two dozen others who remained nameless to her but will not be forgotten.

If Cassian's grim look is any indication, he is thinking along the same lines.

"What do you suggest for our cover story to tell Nawara?" she asks after a while.

He looks up at her; at least it is good to see the sadness give way to reflection. "What I've learned early on in intel is that it's usually best to stick to the facts as much as possible, and only lie where it's crucially important and carries a low risk of being exposed by cross-checking. If you have to lie, it's usually better to leave things out than invent stuff to avoid tripping yourself up."

She nods; her own experience has taught her pretty much the same. "The shuttle's going to be the tough sell. We could say we had a job to steal something and are on the run after botching up the robbery, which would explain the need to stay off the radar without bringing up any Imperial entanglement, but piloting this thing–"

"It still holds up," Cassian argues. "We ran and our getaway ship got heavily damaged in a shootout so we hijacked this one."

"Sure." It does sound plausible. "And we could say we picked it because we needed its data storage capacity to hold K's memory files– "

"Better keep K out of this," Cassian cuts in.

" _I can see how it may be an option_ ," K pipes up, " _but I would like to know, Cassian, why you think so_."

This is the closest she sees Cassian to laughing over the past two days. Or ever, for that matter.

"The way you shoot off your mouth, K, we won't last five minutes if you get a chance to talk."

" _I can be diligent about keeping sensitive data to myself, Cassian_." It may be her imagination, or else K's currently-flat voice sounds more pissed off than it did moments before.

"I know, K." He actually tries to sound soothing. "It's just that right now it's hard to think of any data that are _not_ sensitive."

This does the trick, apparently. " _On second thoughts, I agree_."

x x x

She sits up in the co-pilot's chair with a start, fighting a disorienting dizziness as her field of vision is flooded by the swirling light patterns of hyperspace. She did not even notice when she dozed off. On the plus side, she did not take any major falls or hit her head, so at least she is pretty sure it is not the side effect of a concussion, unlike–

"Cassian!"

She gasps his name before she has had a look at him; when she turns toward him it is instantly reassuring to see him looking right back at her, awake.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she says belatedly. "Didn't realise I'd fallen asleep."

"It's OK, I was keeping an eye on the panel." On second thought, he sounds considerably less alert than he did before she had nodded off.

"But I'm supposed to keep you awake– "

"Supposed to keep me awake?" He sounds somewhere between baffled and intrigued.

"For the concussion. K said I couldn't give you another stim patch until six hours after the first one, and I had to keep you conscious to avoid a brain swelling– "

"K worries too much," he argues unconvincingly.

Sure enough, K won't let it slip. " _I worry as much as is needed to keep you alive, Cassian. If I didn't, you'd be long dead_."

Considering that they would surely be dead yesterday had it not been for K's quick thinking about the shuttle, she is not inclined to argue.

Nor, apparently, is Cassian. "I know."

"So what exactly does keeping me awake involve?" The way he is eyeing her sideways makes her think he finds it amusing, and she bites down on a spot of K-style chiding of her own.

"K suggested that I try slapping you," she cannot help quipping, and is pleased to see the answering eye-roll; Cassian may not be fully alert but is not beyond appreciating a snarky comeback. "But the less radical solution is to keep talking."

"With the kind of voice K has at the moment, it would be a sure way to send me to sleep."

"Not him," she corrects. "And not me either. _You_ have to talk to make certain you stay awake."

He raises his eyebrows. "What, you want me to give you a speech?"

"You can if you want," she shoots back. "Doesn't have to be a speech, you know, just anything that comes to mind."

He ponders it for a moment. "What comes to mind, for the most part, is I hope we find this Nawara, he doesn't kick us out, and our shuttle doesn't get impounded. That's about it, really," he concludes with an apologetic smirk.

"Doesn't have to be a full tactical briefing, either," she points out.

She can tell he wants to shake his head before thinking better of it. "I don't know… I guess you'll have to ask me things, and I'll do my best to answer."

 _And make it sound like an interrogation. Great_. Not to mention that, between the nature of his role within the Alliance and the tragedy that his early life must have been, she will be navigating a minefield of sensitive subjects. But if it is a choice between pissing him off and letting him die, then there really is no choice.

"How old are you?"

If anything, she is more surprised than he is when this is the first thing she blurts out; but he takes it in stride.

"Twenty-six. What about you?"

That, too, catches her unawares. There is nothing strange about the question per se; it was just that she was getting ready for an awkward round of one-sided questioning, and it is encouraging, and maybe just a bit gratifying, that he shows some interest.

"Twenty-one as of three weeks ago." She gives him a sly sideways look. "Says so on file, doesn't it?"

"It does," he concedes. "I wasn't sure it was true, though. Looking at the things you'd done, it seemed you were too young to have racked up such a record, and then again when I saw you I figured you couldn't be much older than eighteen."

Had their circumstances been less dire, and had Cassian been less distracted by the injuries and the effect of the meds, she would have dismissed his words as bald-faced flattery; but things being as they are, it ends up being more flattering by virtue of likely being true.

OK, there's no time to bask in flattery, accidental or otherwise. Her job is to keep Cassian talking, so talk he will. "How did you find me? I mean how did you get onto my trail in the first place?"

"I wasn't looking for you as Jyn Erso."

Her eyes go wide; rather than explaining anything, this makes the whole thing really confusing.

Seeing her surprise, he goes on. "Part of my duties has always been to recruit undercover agents within the Empire, as well as Rebel field operatives. I joined Alliance Intel at fourteen, but they didn't send me on full-scale missions until about four years later, after I'd been to Carida. My first assignments were to hang around military bases and get talking to the cadets, get them thinking about how there are better choices in life than Imperial service, and help put those who seemed genuinely swayed in touch with Alliance contacts. I don't do as much recruitment now…" he sounds wistful saying it, "but occasionally, when we get an… accidental vacancy, I look through Imperial criminal records for good candidates. So when I saw they were on the trail of this code slicer with superior hand-to-hand combat skills, I thought I should look you up– "

Before he can go on, she jumps in with a sort of indignant cry. "Wait a minute… did you people put me in prison so you could get me at General Draven's mercy?!"

Cassian looks more incredulous than offended. "You've got to be kidding. It would have been much easier to find a chance to talk to you _before_ you got locked up than have to break you out."

She has to concede the point.

"But by the time you were in prison, Draven and I had put two and two together between what was known of your association with Saw Guerrera and Galen Erso's long-lost daughter, so leaving you in Imperial hands wasn't an option."

"And then you met me and changed your mind about wanting me around." She recalls K's sulky quip when she first boarded Cassian's U-wing: _I think you going with us is a bad idea, and so does Cassian_.

To her surprise, he neither argues nor confirms the point, just looks at her with oddly earnest eyes for a couple of seconds before answering. "No. I didn't change my mind. I thought going to Jedha was too high risk to bring you along, but it doesn't mean I– " He makes as if to put up his left hand to cover his eyes, before the arm wound makes him think better of it. "It was obvious from the start that you were every bit as smart and resourceful as your history suggested, and a natural leader no matter how standoffish you tried to appear."

 _A natural leader? Really?_ Is that all he sees in her? And is that opinion of her something he should seemingly be getting embarrassed about?

 _Keep him talking_. The rest can wait.

"You said you joined Alliance Intelligence at fourteen."

If he is surprised by her abrupt change of tack, his second apparent reaction is more akin to relief than irritation. "Yes."

"Then how come your first intel mission was at eighteen? And how did you join the Rebellion in the first place?" These may be dangerous currents, but probably safer than questioning him about his opinion of her.

Then again, when she sees his soft eyes darken with old pain, she wishes she had not asked.

But he does answer; not at once but steadily, in the quiet, serious voice he seems to reserve for rare unguarded moments.

"I told you I grew up on M'haeli. It's a quiet world for the most part, the hinterland is very quiet and rural, but it has a big and very busy spaceport as it sits at the crossroads between Expansion Region traffic and the main route to the Core Worlds. My parents moved there before I was born, when my brother was about four. He had severe allergies that made his life miserable back on Corellia, and they thought bringing him up away from big cities would help. It did, and my mother even found work at the local hospital. Back in Coronet City she was a well-known surgeon, and she took up residency in N'croth, the capital, but we could live on the plains outside the city. My father restored an old lodging house at the spaceport and rented rooms to pilots on layover stops. When the Republic fell and the Rebellion started, there were suddenly a lot of resistance fighters from nearby systems who had to hide out in the Expansion Region, so my parents closed off one wing of the lodging house with a permacrete partition and converted it into a secret medical facility to treat the wounded. I was almost six at the time and I'd take turns with my brother helping them around this makeshift hospital, handing out the meds to the patients mostly. They all needed someone to talk to while they were there so I made friends with a lot of them."

He takes time before continuing, and she cannot bring herself to prompt him.

"When the Empire decided to occupy M'haeli, someone found out about the hidden hospital at the spaceport and two weeks after the occupation they came looking. I was at school when it happened, and then came back home and it was empty, and their comlinks didn't answer. I found a spare key to my father's landspeeder and went to the spaceport, and saw the building burning. There were two survivors who got out and died later from the burns, one of them told me how they'd tried to barricade themselves inside and shoot at the troopers to let the patients escape, but the Imperials brought a grenade mortar unit and targeted the building point blank. My brother was there too, it was his turn to – help distribute the meds – "

Whatever she may say would be shallow and inadequate. Instead she reaches out a hand for his right arm, fingers tightening around his wrist. _You're not the one who has lost everything_. No, not by a long shot.

"One of the two survivors managed to hail a Rebel guerrilla unit at Aquaris a short distance away before he died, and they flew in and picked me up. I stayed with them for about six or seven years, once I'd learned the basics I became their explosives courier, sort of. I was able to sneak around unnoticed and plant bombs at Imperial facilities. Then I went with them to Dantooine, the Rebel headquarters at the time, and ended up staying there. I lied about being fifteen and they let me join the infantry as a private, but one of my former fellow saboteurs from Aquaris let slip that I was really thirteen and they kicked me out as they technically only accept sixteen-year-olds. But then Intel decided they could use me for the recruitment missions instead."

She recalls something else he said when he first talked of those. "You've been to Carida?"

"I was there for two standard years." Seeing her wide eyes, he explains, not without a touch of smugness. "I was sixteen by then and it was decided I would enlist as cadet, an officer trainee. I'd spent a few months studying for their entrance exam and Draven's people had put together an airtight record for what was supposed to have been my childhood and early life, and no one ever suspected me. What I did while I was there, apart from inciting rebellious ideas in my fellow cadets, was copying and relaying anything I could get my hands on. Training materials, tactical readouts, Imperial protocol, you name it, I stole it and sent it on to Dantooine. And on top of that I came back with two years of training, and tons of sharpshooting practice, behind me."

No wonder Intel has been holding on to him ever since, and no wonder he can blend in so well as an Imperial. "So you've never, ever been caught, before or since?"

"That depends on what you mean by _caught_ ," he counters. "If you mean captured and put in detention, then no; the first man to put me behind bars was Saw Guerrera," he goes on with a wry smile. "I was apprehended a few times by patrols and the like as a saboteur and later as a recruiter, but I always managed to get away before they could lock me up. The closest I ever came to a detention cell before Jedha was on Ord Mantell when a trooper caught me stealing his datapad, and the only reason it took me a few minutes to escape was because he broke my nose and the bleeding kept me distracted."

 _Not to mention the pain_. So that's how he got that particular injury; she'd wondered about that. "Must have hurt for quite a while."

Cassian dismisses it, as she knew he would. "Not really. On the plus side, when I got back to Dantooine it made a big impression on my girlfriend at the time."

"Girlfriend? How old were you again?" she teases.

"Fourteen. That girl wasn't… serious."

Is she imagining things, or is he embarrassed again? Well, since this time she is not the subject of the narrative, she can afford to taunt him to her heart's content. "And how exactly would you define _serious_?"

There is no mistaking the embarrassment this time; it almost looks like he is blushing. "Well, you know… you _know_ , when you stay with someone for years, or plan to get married, that kind of serious."

His predicament makes her bolder. With any luck, once the concussion after-effects have passed and the meds have worn off, he won't remember this. "And how many… serious girlfriends have you had?"

"Just two. One was a fellow Intel lieutenant, and got shot on a mission at Bilbringi. The other was a Y-wing pilot, and half their squadron, including her, died in an ambush."

"I'm sorry," she mutters. No, there is no safe line of questioning with him, when virtually all his life has been lived in wartime.

" _As Cassian says, those two were the serious ones, anyway_ ," K puts in, apparently looking to fill in missing facts. " _Then there were_ …"

" _K!_ " Cassian snaps at him so vehemently that she almost jumps in her seat.

" _Yes, Cassian?_ " K sounds completely unruffled.

"You shut your rusty mouth right now or I swear, I'll find a 3PO body to put you in. A _golden_ one, mind you."

She doubts whether snickering at this exchange is going to endear her to either of its participants, but she cannot help it anyway. Cassian shoots her a rather pointed look, but all this is apparently wasted on K, who just happily goes on.

" _Sorry, I thought you told me you completely trusted Jyn_ ," and Cassian takes it as his cue to put a hand over his eyes.

"Yes; but I didn't tell you to destroy my reputation in front of her," he says after a second or two, and this time she is quite certain that his delayed response has little to do with the effects of the concussion.

Little does he know, she figures, that none of the short liaisons she has got into could be honestly considered romantic, let alone _serious,_ relationships.

As it turns out, her faraway look is not lost on him. "What?" he prompts, raising an eyebrow.

 _Think of something, damn it_. When she gives up hope of concocting a plausible excuse, she goes with the classic _best defence_ ; in this case, a particularly trick question.

"I was just wondering… Ever had to – seduce anyone – in the line of duty?" Inwardly she wonders, and hopes it does not show, how she would have behaved if he'd _had to seduce_ her.

When he does not speak at once, she figures she has the answer; but while his words an instant later are not unexpected, she is curiously buoyed up by the message.

"Once," he says, fidgeting with his shirt cuff. "But I'd never do it again. It's just… wrong".

"I'm glad to know I'm travelling with a real gentleman," she half teases, though there is probably more conviction to her words than she cares to acknowledge.

Once more, K jumps in before Cassian can come up with a reply, but this time his words arguably do more to dispel the prospect of inhabiting a 3PO body than hasten it. " _He really is, you know. He just does not always admit it._ "

x x x

"So what's Abregado-rae like?" She does her best to sound, and stay, awake, and can tell that Cassian is likewise struggling. They have trod safer ground for the past hour or so, talking about planets each of them has been to, comparing personal favourites and those they would each prefer to avoid. But the fatigue is getting better of them both, and she can tell that Cassian can no longer feel any effect from the stim patch. He is slumped in the pilot's seat, his head lolling to one side and his eyes closed; at least she is glad he's still talking.

"Ever been to Tatooine?" he asks, after a couple of second's pause.

"Passed through Mos Eisley once… picking up high-encryption blank datacards… for a forgery job."

"The Abregado spaceport looks just like that. The rest… is better… more hilly… you get some… grassy slopes, instead of sand dunes." She distantly hears him finish the sentence in a low mutter.

When she sits bolt upright, not more than five minutes later, his face is worryingly blank.

"Cassian?"

She climbs out of the chair, steps over to him and takes his hand. At least she can still feel a pulse. Just about. Sort of.

"Cassian?" she tries, more insistently.

" _I think he may have gone unconscious, Jyn_ ," K tells her presently. " _I am sorry. I wish I could access the ship's sound alert circuits to try wake him. All I can do is speak, and as Cassian said, this voice is not really_ …"

"Can I give him another stim patch?" she asks over K's unhappy ruminations.

" _Not yet. You'd have to wait for another half hour. But by then we should be landing so maybe it's better if you leave it until he can have proper medical treatment._ "

 _Assuming he makes it that far_. She cannot bring herself to say it out loud, cannot really contemplate the prospect of losing him. Not after all they have been through, not after she has lost so much – so many – in the space of three days. Saw. Her father. Bodhi. Chirrut. Baze. She cannot lose Cassian, too. _Especially_ not him.

Her miserable reverie is interrupted by the realspace re-entry alert.

x x x

"I'm trying to reach Nawara Olan, or anyone at Starfire Electronics who can put me through to him."

Apparently, her statement has been wasted on the spaceport controller droid among the powerful static bursts.

"State your name, business, and destination on Dorvalla," the controller repeats.

"My name is Liana Hallik, independent trader, of the shuttle _Rook_ ," she improvises off Cassian's agreed-upon new name, hoping that the controller is too busy to question why an Imperial Lambda-class shuttle should be piloted by an independent trader. I am trying to reach Nawara Olan of Starfire Electronics. I have an urgent appointment with him." Hopefully that last minor lie won't come back to bite her in the proverbial.

"Stay on the channel, Liana Hallik. I will advise you once I have your landing pad location."

An interminable minute later, she exhales with silent relief as she is directed to Landing Pad 16. She thanks the controller, shuts off the channel and turns her attention back to the urgent business of flying – a skill she admittedly has very limited experience of. Driving a speeder bike above ground is one thing; landing a shuttle in a spaceport, however…

"K?"

" _Jyn?_ "

"Call up the layout map for Dorwalla Spaceport. I need to locate Landing Pad 16."

" _Ready_."

She scans the schematic map on the secondary display. "How do I activate the landing sequence? Is there an automated protocol I can– "

It is K's turn to interrupt her with an answer, apparently eager to impart the good news.

" _Yes, Jyn, you can engage the auto landing protocol using the landing pad coordinates. Copy the binary coordinate readout from the top line of the layout map on the secondary display, then go to primary, select_ main, _then_ navigation protocols, _then_ planetfall and landing, _then_ autocue sequence, _then input the planet name and code and the coordinates into the query boxes. The planet code for Dorvalla is IR118374DRV. Then select_ activate. _You will need to manually engage the repulsorlift thrusters and the landing gear. Watch out for the control panel keys, each of these two will flash when it needs to be pressed_."

"Thank you, K, you're a lifesaver." For the second time in less than a standard day, they would be in huge trouble without him. Not dead, perhaps, this time – not immediately, anyway – but with Cassian unconscious, every minute counts.

" _You're welcome_ ," K comes back. " _Cassian is right, Jyn, he has been through worse injuries, and he has always made it through and managed to avoid Imperial capture_."

And then, just as she is about to thank him again for the reassurance, K delivers the characteristic conclusion.

" _So if this goes wrong, it will really be a first_."

x x x

In retrospect, the landing went as smoothly as she might have hoped for, she reflects as she listens to the engines powering down, the words _landing protocol successfully completed_ glowing in the centre of the main display. All she had to do was press two keys as K had warned her, and watch the shifting reflection of the local sun on Dorvalla's purple-grey ocean as their shuttle circled the planet, homing in on the spaceport. Three-quarters of Dorvalla's surface are covered by water, she recalled, with dry land stretching as a single continent seemingly wrapped like a thick creeper vine around the shiny ocean surface, its meandering shape now accented by the irregular long plumes of thick white clouds tracing the tops of the jagged mountain ridges that separate the windswept uninhabitable oceanside plains from the milder, lush valleys on the interior. It was Dorvalla's crazy fast rotation, she mused, its day length just over half a standard Coruscant day, that caused devastating hurricanes to form on the ocean surface, making nearby planes barren of life save for the most resilient lichens; but the inland valleys reaped the full benefit of the protection offered by the steep mountain barriers and were teeming with plant life and uniformly short-statured but fairly diverse animal species. It reminded her somewhat of Lah'mu, her second and last childhood home: perhaps that was the reason she accepted the offer to work for Nawara five years ago, despite the remote location and the crazy 12-hour circadian rhythm.

And now, she figures as she looks at the landing bay blast doors staying firmly shut, all she can do is wait for her welcome party, if welcome is a word she dares to use. It is common practice at urban spaceports to keep these doors locked to avoid accidental damage during take-off, but they normally open within a minute of landing to allow passengers and cargo to exit into the city.

" _Jyn?_ " K prompts her.

"Yes?"

" _You need to set the timer to power me down so I can avoid detection_."

She almost forgot. "Thank you, K." She follows the memory bank menu to the power saving settings. "One-minute countdown OK with you?"

" _Yes, Jyn_."

"You got it," she mutters as she selects and confirms the setting. "Talk to you soon, K." _I hope_.

K does not reply. She retrieves and re-checks Cassian's blaster, takes another look at its unconscious owner, and sits there, wondering how long it may take for whoever may be coming to retrieve her.

With a muffled clang, the doors open a crack and start sliding apart; and silhouetted in the washed-out light beyond she sees four tall armoured humanoids with blaster rifles surrounding a slightly shorter but equally imposing cloaked being.

She wishes for a second that K were still around to provide a modicum of a morale boost. Then again, any lines he would have likely given her were bound to include _having a bad feeling about this_.

And he certainly would be right.

.

TBC

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The way I took a guess at their respective ages is for the most part based on canon and the _Rogue One_ plot. If I remember right, the time between _Revenge of the Sith_ and _A New Hope_ is supposed to be 20 years; so for Cassian to have fought in the Rebellion since he was six, seeing how his character looks to be close to his thirties, he would have to have been there right from the outset; hence 26 as the "oldest" estimate. Jyn, again if I remember right, mentions last seeing her father 15 years ago (when she looked to me to be about five), and mentions Saw leaving her "a long time ago" when she was sixteen; hence she would be 20-21 at the time of _Rogue One_.

See you next chapter :)


	5. old acquaintance

First off, a big thank you once again to the followers and reviewers! I wish there were an "inline" comment layout here like they have on AO3, as otherwise replying to comments with PMs seems a bit stalker-ish ;) But I do appreciate the feedback.

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She has to drag herself forward every step.

She descends from the ramp thinking through the possibilities; it could be Nawara's men, it could be Imperial officials, or a gang of unaffiliated bandits. Even if these _are_ Nawara's men, it likely means that he no longer sees her as a desirable contact let alone a welcome guest, and will probably tell her to go back to where she came from. In either of the other two scenarios, she and Cassian are as good as dead. She stands no chance of taking them out with the blaster; with four of them brandishing rifles, by the time she shoots one or two, one of the others will kill her. If she shoots the leader first she might gain a second or so of lead time, but the end will be the same.

As she heads toward the strangers awaiting her at the blast doors, her jaw is set but her hands are already raised in a sign of surrender.

The rifles are trained on her the moment she emerges into their field of vision; but by the time she is ten steps away the cloaked leader raises his own hands to peel back the hood, and even before she sees the face, a flash of red eyes makes her exhale in a ragged sigh.

"Nawara…"

He takes a single step toward her. Now that her eyes are more accustomed to daylight, she can make out the familiar face framed by thick _lekku_ wrapped loosely around his neck, glowing orange-red eyes set deep into the pale pink flesh typical of older Twi'leks, and can finally identify the tall bodyguards as purple-skinned Devaronians, their menacing stature further augmented by the curling horns sprouting from their foreheads.

Nawara peers at her for another long moment before delivering the verdict in his purring voice. "It really _is_ you, Liana Hallik."

She has to admit that showing up in an Imperial shuttle, assuming Nawara bothered to run a check on her ship's entry record upon being informed of her request to see him – and _he_ surely would – was bound to make anyone suspicious, let alone a borderline-legal Twi'lek businessman.

She waves a hand toward the shuttle; the guards' eyes follow her motion but the rifle muzzles do not. "I know _this_ must look… strange. I owe you an explanation, but I also need to ask you something."

"It can wait," he purrs. "For now, you should not hold it against me that I would like to see what exactly you have onboard."

He motions to the Devaronians; two of them step forward and set off at a brisk pace toward the landing ramp.

"No!" she yelps before she can think better of it. The first two guards pause without turning around, but the remaining two immediately re-train the rifles on her.

"Wait… I… my pilot is still on board."

Nawara's glowing eyes narrow.

"He suffered major injuries and has been unconscious for the past hour. Let me come along onboard with you, if he happens to come around, I'll need to warn him not to resist." It is a remote possibility, but should it somehow happen, the risk of a fatal misunderstanding would be too great.

Nawara nods at the front guards; they each take half a step aside, letting her pass, but the instant she is ahead of them, she feels the rifle muzzle pressed into her back.

She carefully retraces her steps up the ramp, then further forward through the dim interior; as they progress, the guard keeps the rifle at her back while his companion takes a minute checking crates and hatches and peering into cabins. She mentally kicks herself for not having made a similar inspection in all the time she spent on the shuttle; she assumed it to be empty and now hopes for dear life that they do not discover any incriminating surprises. She seems to be in luck, and tries to hide her relief as they step onto the bridge.

Cassian is still slumped in the pilot's seat, and seeing him much as she described seems to work further in her favour with the guards, if the direction of their rifle muzzles is any indication.

"I need a repulsorlift pallet to take him off the ship." She tries to inject her voice with all the calmness, and all the humility, that she can summon up.

"We must check with the boss," one of the guards answers; his voice is flat but not outwardly hostile. She nods her acknowledgement, and they head back into the bay.

The guard who spoke to her walks forward and says a few words in Nawara's ear, and Nawara slowly inclines his head; all she can hear of their exchange is a low rumble, but it looks like the odds may be turning in her favour.

She takes a slow step forward, then another, noting that she is no longer tracked by the weapons.

"My pilot is seriously injured and I was hoping for a chance to beg you to give him emergency treatment." She is not much good at being obsequious, but does her best on this occasion. From what she recalls, Nawara is far from being the height of self-absorbed arrogance that a few of his fellow Twi'leks are known to be guilty of, but all high-ranking Twi'lek males, brought up in a hierarchical clan structure, are susceptible to a spot of grovelling.

His glowing eyes grow momentarily dimmer. "You are very concerned about this pilot."

An outright acknowledgement may eventually bring complications, but she sees no immediate reason to lie in this case… especially remembering how uncannily good Nawara is at reading human body language, to the point that some considered him a mind-reader. "Yes. He is in very bad shape and I really need him… to fly."

"Very well." He takes a moment's pause before addressing another of his guards. "Malloc?"

The Devaronian steps forward.

"Take a cargo pallet and bring the man from the shuttle out here."

She brings forward her hands as if to stop him before thinking better of it; but by now she is no longer seen as a potential threat. "He has a broken back… probably. You have to be very careful lifting him onto the pallet– "

Instead of a reply, Nawara motions to a second guard. His companion has by now activated the pallet that had been hovering in the far corner of the landing bay and steered it back toward them; now the pair of them walk it on board, and Jyn's fingers tighten into fists until she sees them re-emerge accompanying Cassian who looks no worse than he did two minutes earlier.

"I take it you would like to discuss this… request that you have?" Nawara prompts her.

"If you would grant me the chance," she ventures.

"I believe it is best done at a less public venue. I have a landspeeder waiting outside. Lock down your ship and follow me." Once she has completed the simple steps and re-emerges just as the shuttle ramp begins to rise, he motions to the guards and follows them out of the landing bay, Jyn hurrying to match their stride.

x x x

"It has been quite a while since I last saw you, Liana."

Knowing Nawara, this is as close as he'd get to the direct question of _what have you been doing all this time_. But the indirect manner in which it is phrased does not make an answer any less mandatory.

By now they are sitting on a low dais strewn with cushions at his private quarters at the top tier of one of the multitude of terraced buildings, hewn from the local mustard-coloured stone, clinging to both sides of a steep valley to the immediate north of the capital city. The shape of the local settlements, dictated by their valley-side locations, itself dictates the local architectural hierarchy; the higher up a dwelling is the more expensive and desirable it tends to be, and Nawara has spared no expense asserting his status in this regard. The internal furnishings are equally opulent, Nawara's apparent desire to create the opposite of his homeworld lifestyle evident here as well: unlike the rough stone warrens, harsh colours and minimal furnishings of Twi'leki dwellings on his native Ryloth, his quarters are a muted palette of an array of hanging fabric curtains and soft furnishings, occasional gold-hued metal accents echoed in the polished golden exterior of a 3PO protocol droid, the favoured status symbol of successful businessmen eager to stress their galactic reach. But perhaps the greatest luxury he has afforded himself is, quite literally, invisible: military-grade transparisteel windows, huge uninterrupted panes wrapping around the room offering unparalleled views while protecting his quarters from the occasionally dangerous high winds that plague top-floor dwellings, while less affluent residents have to content themselves with windows made up of tiny conventional glass panes set into durasteel grids, giving their rooms the appearance of prison cells.

Not that there is any view to be enjoyed on this occasion; the local sunset is still at least an hour away but the layer of thick fog that rises up the valley in the morning and descends at night has already started its progress down the mountain slope, turning the splendid panorama into a uniform greyish-white void.

In any case, she has more pressing concerns than the local urban highlights, even though things are looking up considerably compared to their tense meeting at the landing bay.

Their ride back to Ridgeside City from the spaceport in Nawara's spacious and fully-enclosed silver landspeeder afforded her the chance to tell him the cover story she had agreed upon with Cassian, of a pair of hapless thieves on the run from their disgruntled customer and their mark alike, their dire situation made worse by her pilot's unfortunate fall from a height and complicated by their rather eye-catching means of conveyance. She could not quite tell how much Nawara believed it, though the Devaronian guards were rather obviously entertained. But when she was finished he expressed general sympathy and assured her that the services of the prized 2-1B surgeon droid, as well as the use of the bacta tank to the extent necessary to treat _Captain Rook's_ injuries, were at their disposal. The other member of the party, a younger Twi'lek male if his pink eyes and grey-ish skin were an indication, who, as she discovered, had been waiting for them in the landspeeder, said very little throughout the ride, apart from the initial greetings where he was introduced as Naroon without further explanations. She remembered well enough that both Nawara's now-adult children were female, and both of them were married off-world, so her best guess in the absence of hard facts was that Naroon was a son-in-law, and she put his reticent manner down to the restrictions of Twi'leki hierarchy.

Now she has the equally important task of answering this new query in a way guaranteed not to arouse concern. Luckily, her exploits and _modus operandi_ up until a week ago are well enough aligned with the robbery story.

"It has been four and a half years, true," she confirms, picking her cue off Nawara's not-quite-question, and doing her best to mirror his rather formal Basic grammar. "I have been travelling around the galaxy so much that I lost track of time, but I have the fondest memories of my time here." This might be laying it on a bit thick, but the way Nawara's eyes flash at the innocent flattery, she figures it was a good move. "Most of what I did initially was code slicing. but lately I have been more involved in… asset appropriation." She gives him a knowing look, and can tell that he appreciates the wry humour of the way she referred to theft. "I have to say, some of the jobs I carried out were quite lucrative, but as I am now finding out, the downside of this career can be quite… unforgiving, and having to deal with a new customer for every job sometimes makes me wish for more predictability." She wonders for an instant if the idea that just struck her is going to be much help, but on the upside, it is truthful enough to be relayed with conviction. "That is one of the reasons I am quite concerned about Cassian – Captain Rook. He has given me a lead to a customer who could be a viable long-term option." An interesting way to describe the Rebel Alliance, for sure, but being creative with the terminology does not make the substance any less true. "What happened just now with our escape was not his fault," she adds, though she immediately wonders if she is saying too much. "We were faced with overwhelming odds and he did everything possible to improve them."

Nawara inclines his head, but does not immediately answer.

"I am glad you have met with reasonable success," he says eventually. "And seeing how you see this Captain as important to your future endeavours, I will be happy to assist in his recovery." His eyes narrow for an instant. "I might, however, have a request of my own to make of you."

She should have expected this, if only because the Twi'leki reputation of being tenacious negotiators is well and truly deserved, so much so that back on Ryloth, unsolicited favours and gifts are frowned upon as they are seen as groundwork for future bargaining leverage. Etiquette would dictate that in this case, she should be able and willing to reciprocate; she only hopes that the request is not exorbitant.

"And I shall be happy to do my best fulfilling it."

"Naroon and I are planning a– " his eyes flash faintly as he recalls her words, "an _asset appropriation_ venture, and it would be a great help if you could play a role in it."

In other words, they are planning a heist, and Cassian's treatment will be her reward in lieu of a cut for taking part in it. All things considered, it could be a lot worse.

"You can count on my best efforts."

"I appreciate your willingness." He gets up from the dais, signifying the conclusion of the audience. "We shall meet to discuss our plan the morning of the day after tomorrow, which is–" he glances at a nearby datapad – "twenty standard hours from now." She reminds herself that Dorvallan days are only half as long as standard. "Until then, I hope you can take the opportunity to rest and recover from your travels. But in the meantime it will be my pleasure to see you at dinner with my associates in an hour's time."

"It will be an honour," she says, as deferentially as she can.

He snaps his fingers at the 3PO. "You come along now, and show Mistress Hallik her sleeping quarters."

As Nawara walks her to the entrance, the 3PO shuffling along after them, her eye lands on a striking hologram image in the spacious hallway; for an instant she is so intrigued as to take a step toward it and peer closer.

"Could it really be–" Her surprise is not feigned.

Nor, she thinks, is the pride in Nawara's voice as he answers. "You are correct, it _is_ Shani. This was taken last week, just before she left on her trip offworld."

Whatever Jyn's views on over-indulging in personal vanity may be, she is impressed despite herself. The lithe, sinuous female, ribbon-wrapped _lekku_ curled elegantly over her shoulders, looks barely older than Jyn in standard years; for that matter, she probably looks younger than her own married daughters. The only slight giveaway is the shade of her skin, paler than what would be characteristic of a youngster.

"She looks younger and younger every time I see her," Jyn says, and means it.

"And it is costing more and more every year," Nawara mutters under his breath, and Jyn has to bite her lip not to smirk. He may be forgiven this frivolous comment vis-à-vis his wife, but Jyn must not be seen as noticing it. "I regret that she is unable to hear this in person," Nawara presently says in his normal voice, if only to cover up his momentary lapse of protocol, "but she has gone to her clan relatives on Ryloth to have her _lekku_ tattooed. She does not trust local artists to do it. I am not entirely convinced that it is a good idea, but she was quite insistent."

Jyn does her best to keep the amusement out of her face. It is a well-known fact that Twi'leki women are consummate charmers, and it appears that their husbands are just as susceptible to their wiles as gullible non-Twi'leki males.

"I am certain that it will only enhance her beauty," Jyn insists with the most respectful smile she can muster.

And hopes that between her flattery and her thieving skills, she will stay in Nawara's good graces long enough for Cassian and herself to safely make it off Dorvalla.

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TBC

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Devaronians (or at least one of them) show(s) up briefly in the cantina scene in _A New Hope_ – if you look closely you may spot the tall horned guy looking rather like, well, a devil.


	6. trade-off

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The golden fireball glows on the horizon, her eyes riveted to its mesmerizing deadly spectacle. Somewhere at the back of her mind there flickers a desperate will to run, to fight, to live; but her body refuses to obey her as she sits slumped on the beach by the oceanside. Cassian is there with her; and she is both heartbroken that he too will be dead in a matter of seconds and comforted despite herself by the knowledge that he will be there, with her, until they both cease to exist. He holds her close and she clings to him as the blinding light and unbearable scorching heat draws nearer…

Jyn sits bolt upright with a sharp gasp that makes her throat burn, at once panicking and soothed by the inky darkness surrounding her. There is no beach, no explosion, no Cassian.

From what she can tell she is sitting on a bed – a bunk, she corrects herself as her legs swing off the narrow pallet. As she struggles to steady her breath, she runs through a habitual mental checklist, prompting herself to remember her surroundings. She is in her cabin at the guest quarters at Nawara's residence on Dorvalla. She is known here as Liana Hallik. She arrived the previous evening and was given temporary shelter on the pretext of being an unlucky thief. Cassian Andor – Cassian _Rook_ – who was with her, is getting treatment at the med bay. The explosion… the explosion was real, she remembers, but they escaped. Barely, but still.

Her eyes search around for a source of light; twisting her head toward the door she sees a climate control panel glowing dimly next to the entrance. 02:48; she remembers Dorvalla's 12-hour day and figures that the others will be getting up in just over an hour; their sleeping pattern alternates roughly four hours' worth of sleep with eight hours' wakefulness. She doubts if she will be able to follow the local example, at least this morning. Hopefully she will be forgiven a late awakening at least this once, if only on account of her recent arrival and exhausting travel that preceded it.

She settles back down on the mattress and forces her breathing to a steady slow rhythm until she drifts back into blissfully dreamless sleep.

x x x

She wakes up three hours later considerably better rested; by then it is late morning and the compound looks empty and quiet in the late morning light, Nawara and his lieutenants attending to business elsewhere, so it is left to the 3PO to take her to the dining room for a lonely but relaxed breakfast, after which she is left to her own devices. She wants to take advantage of the good weather to take a walk, or better a ride, or maybe a bit of both, around Ridgeside City, but before she can do that she has a more urgent mission in mind.

"I must warn you, Mistress Hallik, that the 2-1B who runs this facility is quite adamant about the rules of admission for visiting guests," the 3PO prattles on. They are standing outside the door to the med bay, and he has already activated the entrance buzzer, so his fussing about is a mere minor nuisance that carries little threat of thwarting her plan. But once door slides open and they are greeted by the somber-voiced, burnished-grey 2-1B on the other side, she begins to see the truth in his warning.

"I am afraid that is not possible," he intones gravely in response to Jyn's request to see Captain Rook. "After I operated on his back and knee yesterday evening, he spent the entire night immersed in bacta, and is now recovering still under medication. He is asleep," he clarifies, seeing how Jyn shows no sign of budging from the doorway, "so I am afraid you cannot talk to him, Miss."

Grateful as she is to him for his surgical skills and for his apparent concern for Cassian's recovery, she is acutely annoyed at the same time. How can she explain to a droid that it is very important for her to see Cassian even if they cannot talk and even if he is unaware of her visit?

Well, where droids are concerned, the direct approach usually works best.

"I only want to take a look at him," she insists. "It is important for me to see him in a better condition than he was when I last saw him. I will only take a minute…" That was a silly thing to say; seeing his attitude, she can fully expect him to start a timer the moment she steps inside. "…not more than a couple of minutes, at most."

If the 2-1B had the vocal range that would allow him to sigh, he would have surely used it now. But thankfully, he relents. "Very well, Miss. You have five minutes." Her heart leaps at the generosity. "Second door on your right, Miss."

He must have confused his directions, she figures, when she takes a quick glance into the room. She is about to pop back out into the hallway and ask the droid for amended directions when she takes another look – and stops.

It is not just that Cassian looks younger; that alone would not have stopped her from recognizing him. Admittedly, her task is hindered somewhat by the oxygen mask fitted over the lower half of his face; but it is the fact that he looks perfectly relaxed, for once free of all pain and preoccupation, that has made such an incredible difference. With the blood and grime washed off his face, and with his hair brushed back from his forehead, he looks uncharacteristically contented… and downright adorable.

She presently remembers that her visiting time is rather limited, and steps over to the side of the bed.

"Cassian?" she calls softly, on the off chance of him waking up.

He does not stir.

She gently takes his hand resting atop the blanket, her fingers stroking it in a reflexive caress; but he stays asleep.

She stands watching him for a while longer, barely aware of the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She wishes he would have cause to look like this more often, and not just when he is asleep on sedatives. She wishes it were in her power to make it so.

When the 2-1B taps quietly at the side of the doorway to indicate that her time is up, she walks away and pauses to thank him, and the droid has trouble reconciling her smile of gratitude that looks quite genuine with the tears brimming in her eyes.

x x x

There is something to be said for laid-back Imperial governments, she muses as her speeder bike, which Malloc the Devaronian graciously allowed her to borrow from Nawara's hangar bay, skims above the sleepy city streets. Sure, no Imperial government at all would be better yet, but given a dire choice between this kind of pleasantly sleepy backwater and the oppression of Jedha City prior to its annihilation, let alone the paranoid gloom that Coruscant has become, she would take this kind of Imperial control any time.

Shame that it is the exception that proves the rule.

Ridgeside City is just as she remembers it, rows of steep greenish-yellow stone terraces cut lengthwise by impossibly narrow streets, leaving speeder bikes as virtually the only viable means of transport. Once she has done a few laps back and forth on both sides of the valley, she takes her bike to the top of a particularly steep cliff, its near-vertical sides sparing it from encroaching construction, and gets off, leaving the bike hovering in power-down mode as she sits down on the rocks and surveys the valley.

Seen from this height, it is a place of captivating beauty, her vantage point allowing her to see the plentiful vegetation on the mountain slopes and in tiny private gardens that the high walls bordering the streets hide from view, a profusion of thick low shrubs and rambling creeper vines in bright emerald green and turquoise hues dotted with sprays of miniature orange and yellow blossoms. Not only that, but rising above the city murmur lets her better appreciate the subtle background whisper of dozens of tall, narrow silvery-grey waterfalls, most of them blocked from view by buildings and bridges, carrying water down the mountain slopes to the rushing river at the dark, dank bottom of the valley.

She catches herself wondering what Cassian would have thought of this, and whether he might like it enough to let it lift his spirits; and then mentally kicks herself for utter silliness when she catches herself imagining what exactly he might say and how exactly she would like to respond.

When the pale green of the Dorvallan sky starts deepening into a darker shade, signifying the approaching sunset, she gets on the bike and heads back to Nawara's residence.

x x x

"K?" she calls out tentatively when she has completed the power-up sequence and keyed in their agreed-upon password within the memory bank, fighting the sudden dread that K has somehow become inaccessible after she had shut down the shuttle sixteen hours earlier – or worse yet, has disappeared altogether.

She beams with joy when the now-familiar monotone greets her.

" _Hello, Jyn_."

"Good to know you're still here," she greets him in turn, her voice dripping with relief. "But remember, on this planet my name's Liana."

" _Of course it is_ ," he agrees readily. " _I simply assumed that since you correctly keyed in my reactivation access code, you were alone and free to talk_."

"You're right. And yes, I'm alone." Though that is not necessarily a good thing; half an hour earlier, right after dinner, she stopped by the med bay on the off chance that Cassian was awake and feeling better and might care to come along with her to the spaceport, but the 2-1B informed her that he was back in the bacta tank for his second round of intensive treatment – _It will take at least one more session after this one_ , he said, _before he can be declared 95% healthy_ , which was apparently his benchmark for successful recovery. And so, as the others dispersed to their sleeping quarters after dinner, Jyn, still wide awake and unaccustomed to the local pattern of frequent but short spells of sleep, could think of nothing better than ask for a set of infrared goggles, get back to the hangar bay to pick up the speeder bike she had ridden earlier in the day, and ride it through the impenetrable darkness of the moonless Dorvallan night to the spaceport about twenty minutes west of Ridgeside City.

The dinner that followed her town excursion and preceded this nighttime foray was a livelier affair than the one the night before, its star attendee being Shani, freshly returned from Ryloth and eager to show off her intricate _lekku_ tattoos and the shimmery purple silk outfit she had just bought on her homeworld. She was every bit as youthful-looking and sinuously alluring in person as her hologram had suggested, and the way she sat, draped seductively against her husband's side, meant that Nawara apparently paid little attention to the other guests and goings-on. The other dozen or so of his associates and employees could not help stealing appreciative glances at her but were careful to keep these short and furtive. They were a curious bunch, Jyn observed; apart from Nawara and Naroon and Shani, the rest were all non-Twi'leks: a couple of fellow humans, young men about Cassian's age but considerably less good-looking in her view, half a dozen male Devaronians, including Nawara's four guards and two cargo pilots, a pair of silver-pelted male Bothans who sat just about as far apart from one another as the long dinner table would allow, and a slinky Selonian female covered in sleek amber-coloured fur. The Devaronians' attitudes of easy, if somewhat crude, camaraderie were the easiest to read, but the Selonian and the Bothans, whose extensive range of non-vocal communication included gestures expressed through rippling fur, were something of a mystery to her. Maybe this gives them an affinity with the Twi'leks, she pondered, considering that the Twi'leks are likewise proficient in non-vocal exchanges by way of twitching their _lekku_ tips.

Now that she is back at the shuttle and has taken advantage of Nawara's gracious instructions to spaceport control to activate the landing bay power supply, she has finally hooked up the drained power cells to the external cables and must wait for two to three standard hours until the charge is complete before she can disconnect them. Not that it bothers her; her tactical meeting with Nawara and Naroon is still four hours away, and she hopes to use her time aboard the shuttle to see what she can do about patching up an interface between K's stored memory and the main shuttle systems.

"K?" she calls out again.

" _Yes, Liana_?" he comes back, and she smirks.

"I'm going to put together the programming patches to hook you up to the shuttle's navicomputer and comm encryption module. Can you put up a restore marker in your memory so you can revert to your last known good configuration if anything goes wrong?"

" _Of course. Do you want me to set it now?_ "

"Now's as good as ever," she mutters as she scrolls through the main shuttle system menu looking for administrator access. "One more thing, can you find me a default master password for accessing Lambda computer registry files?"

A minute later, the required sequence lights up on the memory bank readout screen.

"Thank you, K."

" _You're welcome, and may the Force be with you_." She wonders if droids can really believe in the Force or are simply programmed to use the popular valediction. " _Let me know when you are done writing the patches so I can put myself in standby when you apply them_."

"I will, K. Give me a couple of hours, I want to make sure I don't let slip any glitches."

She wonders briefly if she might use this opportunity of one-on-one time with K to ask him things she wants to know about Cassian. He has told her enough to give her a good idea of what his life has been like, but there is so very much she still wants to know, and no matter how curious she may be, she hopes she never again has to keep him talking to stave off a potentially lethal coma, and yet she may not have a chance to ask him otherwise. Those are not the kind of things she can just bring up out of the blue without it seeming silly or sentimental. Like what he might have wanted to do if there had been no war. What kind of music he likes. What those _serious_ girlfriends of his looked like, for that matter.

She opens her mouth but then bites down on her tongue. No, that would be wrong, like using his trust under false pretenses. She has done it plenty of times with marks and other useful idiots, but she will not be able to face him without shame if she does it now. Not to mention that K, despite all his good intentions, is notoriously confused about what exactly constitutes the notion of personal privacy and what kind of conversations are best forgotten once they have happened.

With a sigh, she keys in the admin password and sets about putting together the code patches.

x x x

"Do you mean it has been stolen _already_?"

She is back in Nawara's quarters; this would be a good time to admire the breathtaking panorama finally visible beyond the transparisteel, but the occasion does not allow it. They are huddled together at an expansive desk, herself and Naroon perched on durasteel crates flanking Nawara in a high-backed padded chair, surveying at a map readout as Nawara gives her the lowdown. She was surprised to see such a small group in attendance, but then again, she does not yet know the nature of the heist.

" _Already_ would be too hasty an assessment, but as of nine hours tomorrow evening it will have been."

"But then.., what is the purpose of blowing up the data vault _after_ that?" she blurts out before the likely answer hits her.

One thing she recalls about Nawara is his patience; no matter how angry or annoyed, he always manages to keep his temper and his voice in check. So now he calmly and patiently sets about explaining the situation to her.

"To cover up the theft, obviously. Ever since the First Imperial Bank of Dorvalla refused my loan request last month, Naroon and I have been working on breaking into their systems to duplicate a number of trading transaction authorisations, all of them due to be executed tomorrow. I applied for the loan citing my de-humidifier business," he explains for her benefit, "although in reality I urgently need the funds to upgrade and expand my synthetic ryll refinement facility. But if the Empire ever got wind of that one, they would expropriate it on customs duty evasion charges and all manner of other ridiculous pretexts. As it was, the bank managers stated that there were no business fundamentals to justify a new credit line for de-humidifier imports. And I let them believe I had accepted it as their final word," Nawara purrs, his eyes glowing brighter. "But I still need the money."

 _And unlike most Twi'leki businessmen who rely on their clan relatives in such circumstances, you have no such option_ , she adds mentally, but keeps it to herself.

"So tomorrow when your duplicate transactions are executed, the credits will leave the bank to end up on your accounts somewhere?" she prompts.

Nawara inclines his head. "Broadly speaking, yes. There are several intermediate steps involving their use to purchase non-traceable valuables to make certain that there is no way of connecting me to the missing funds. But in the end I shall be the beneficiary and First Imperial Bank should be none the wiser."

She can appreciate the elegance of the solution, so long as it goes as planned.

"The only weak link, if you wish, is the very first transfer from the bank into correspondent accounts," Nawara continues. "If Imperial investigators should decide to study the transaction records, they may notice the irregularities and might even have the misguided idea of linking them to me as a suspected disgruntled customer. So to make certain that nothing remains of those records to be studied, we need to destroy the data vault storage before the daily transaction data batch is copied to their offsite backup facility. An added advantage of the timing," he finishes, "is that the end of the business day coincides with the time the fog tends to pass through that part of town."

Now _that_ makes sense. Destroy the evidence to make sure that once the money is gone, Nawara stays beyond suspicion. "And what if the explosion itself can be tracked to you?"

"Ah." His eyes grow dimmer. "That is where I would suggest that you come in. You, and a droid we are going to load with explosives whose job it will be to plant them. The timing of your arrival was very fortunate in that it allows us to use someone who has not been seen on Dorvalla in years and is, as such, unknown to the local security forces. And with your proficiency with such tasks, I was thinking it would be an easy job for you to remotely manipulate the droid to plant the charges along the vault's perimeter." He pauses and looks at her, trying to gauge her reaction; she does her best to look serenely confident. "The droid will have had its memory banks wiped and re-formatted to leave only the most basic commands that will allow you to manipulate its circuitry, and will be fitted with a self-destruct module mimicking a power cell malfunction, so even if any part of it survives the explosion, it will be of no use in any investigation and will arouse no suspicion."

"What sort of droid?" she asks.

"A Treadwell," Naroon supplies, and both she and Nawara look up at him.

Seeing how Nawara says nothing, she has to say what both of them must be thinking. "It's too small to carry the kind of charge needed to destroy Imperial regulation-grade vault walls, let alone whatever is inside."

Naroon looks momentarily uncomfortable, though she cannot tell whether this is due to embarrassment from being unused to speaking in front of an elder, or irritation at having his decision challenged by an outsider. "It is the only droid we currently have that bears no registration markings and was brought to Dorvalla completely under the radar, so as to be untraceable to us." He pauses before continuing in an almost-sulky tone. "It is either that one or the K-2SO– "

She literally jumps up from the crate before she can stop herself. "K-2SO?!" Belatedly she realizes that she is urgently in need of a plausible excuse for why she should have found the mention so exciting.

Well, like Cassian said, it is best to limit the lies to the necessary minimum and stick to the truth in other respects. "We had a K-2SO droid helping us along on a previous mission but he underwent a… critical failure and we were informed that his body was beyond repair. So we have his memory data saved back at our base but we need a new body to put him into." This is as close to the real events as it can get, so long as the shuttle can be considered _their base_. "If there is any chance– "

She abruptly stops herself. She has already asked one favour of Nawara, and he has been gracious enough; to ask for another one now before she has even been able to repay the first one would be considered a grave breach of Twi'leki etiquette. No, she needs to try a different tack. "If there is any chance I can take on and fulfill that duty myself, I would gladly do so if it then allowed for us to discuss my possible use of that– "

Naroon puts up a hand to interrupt her before she can finish, sharp claws glinting in the sunlight. "It is too risky," he states, his voice suddenly decisive. _For me, or for you?_ she wonders, trying to keep her face blank. "What if you fail, if something happens to stop you from planting all the charges so the data is left intact? A mechanical being has a much higher probability of carrying out its assigned task regardless of external circumstances."

 _Ever tried to transmit top secret plans from an enemy fortress while being shot at by TIE interceptors?_ she thinks sourly. It is not Naroon's place to lecture her about _external circumstances_ ; but she cannot let him know that. Then again, it is not as if his concern is unfounded. Unlike Nawara, he had never seen her until twenty hours ago, and is probably worried about her bailing out as much, if not more, as he is about her failing.

Unexpectedly, Nawara comes to her defence. "You were not here, Naroon, when Liana worked for me. She is very resourceful and determined. And we can arrange for an armed lookout to keep an eye on her via an infrared scope to make certain he sees through the fog, who can warn her of any approaching danger."

Naroon inclines his head. "Who did you have in mind?"

Nawara hesitates, but only for an instant. "I was thinking about sending Malloc…"

She can tell that Naroon wants to object but stops himself. Then again, with the way their _lekku_ tips have been twitching lately, she suspects that the part in Basic that she hears is only half of the full conversation.

"I think it may be better if we send two lookouts, one on the same side of the valley and one on the opposite side," he says eventually, and no matter what else may be going on, it strikes Jyn as a supremely reasonable suggestion.

"And who would you suggest for the second lookout?" Nawara purrs.

Naroon goes still for a couple of seconds; not even the _lekku_ tips move. How hard is it to pick a lookout, she wonders, when their entire outfit is just over a dozen beings?

"I would suggest sending Krey'lya," he finally says. One of the Bothans, she figures, hearing the characteristic name structure.

"Very well," Nawara says. Is it her, or did he agree to this all too easily?

"What if they need to provide covering fire and end up shooting me instead?" she asks as the uncomfortable notion hits her.

Nawara gives her an inscrutable sideways glance, but Naroon is quick to answer. "I will give you a one-directional in-ear comlink that will serve as your position marker for the lookouts. That way the lookouts can warn you of any danger and they will also know who not to shoot if there is a need to."

"Thank you," she says, and means it. Somehow, despite the seemingly simple task ahead of her, she has a feeling she is going to need all the help she can get.

x x x

Three hours later, she is sitting in a town cantina a block away from the bank building nursing a by-now-warm mug of _lomin_ ale and fighting a nagging sense of apprehension. Years of experience have taught her that if a heist seems too easy, it is usually because she has not considered all the scenarios and something is about to go spectacularly wrong. Trouble is, knowing that this may be one of those cases does not bring her any closer to figuring out what in the galaxy she is missing.

The backups they arranged for her all seem legit; after their planning was concluded, Naroon took her to the supplies depot to demonstrate the workings of the in-ear comlink before leaving it to her. He then took her to the surprisingly well-stocked explosives safe – she was baffled for an instant before she remembered that Nawara's synthetic ryll production still depended on what was essentially a mining operation – so she could pick up the explosives and detonators of her choice, with the proviso that she could amend her selection should her on-site survey of the vault later in the day give her grounds for it.

Now that she has seen the bank building and the vault occupying its back portion, and scanned it with a portable sonar array, all the while wearing an infrared vision helmet to avoid her face being accidentally recorded by any security equipment, she is, if anything, even more confident in her choice. It is indeed a regulation-grade Imperial medium-security data vault – the Empire tends to reserve top-notch security measures for its military installations rather than monetary institutions – and the cumulative power of the charges she picked out should be more than enough to put the data storage banks fully out of commission. The way the unremarkable windowless backside of the building looks out onto a deserted alley, with entry and exit points at its either end, is nothing if not fortuitous, and the fact that the bank office sits close to the base of the high cliff she visited earlier for her view of the valley means that at least one of her lookouts will have a superb vantage point to keep track of any movement in the area. The only tricky aspect is caused by the presence of an overly sensitive weapons detector at the bank entrance; the way it flashed and squawked when she passed it with her holstered blaster was enough to make her jump, and she will have to pass close enough to it to trigger it no matter which side of the building she chooses to access the back alley. She will have to leave her blaster on her getaway speeder bike a half a block away, but then again, she will be there to blow the place up, not shoot blaster bolts at it.

…And yet, as she waits for her food to arrive – she excused herself from the communal dinner on this occasion so as to better familiarize herself with the vault surroundings and listen for any relevant chatter among the cantina regulars – she could practically channel K with his _bad feeling_ line.

x x x

She hits the brake on the speeder bike a touch too hard, and has to steady herself on top of it as inertia pushes her forward. Lost in thought, she was mechanically retracing her route back to Nawara's compound when it occurred to her that, with its occupants by now asleep, her time could be better spent getting up to date on galactic happenings. She could do it at Nawara's, true, but with the uneasy feeling from the morning's meeting still tugging at the back of her mind, she thinks it may be a safer bet to do it from the shuttle, especially now that she has patched K into the system and he can scramble all her incoming and outgoing data traffic. She will have to get some sleep this night – by now she has been awake for two Dorvallan days in a row and, at 19 hours spent awake, is pushing close to the duration of a really long standard day – but after two days cut off from the news of the galaxy she is beginning to feel restless. And maybe just a bit hopeful that by now, she might be able to pick up an odd news snippet about an unsuccessful military facility test or the like signifying the destruction of the nightmarish weapon they raced against time, and fought against the odds, to stop.

K greets her with his usual good humour, and she replies in kind; it is best not to tell him about her upcoming heist, she figures, as it will only make him worry unnecessarily in a situation where he can do practically nothing to help. The small talk completed, she calls up the external-source data query and sets about scanning the headlines.

And then, two minutes in, her breath gives out.

 _URGENT NEWS BULLETIN: Alderaan planetary core destroyed in massive magma eruption triggered by unexpected magnetic disturbance. All travel to the Alderaan system is suspended until further notice._

She stares at the words swimming up at her from the display surface. Imperial propaganda news-speak may choose whatever falsehood to wrap it in, but she knows, with the horrifying certainty of an eyewitness, what has happened.

They have failed.

.

TBC

.

Bothans get their honourable mention in _Return of the Jedi_ , but the most detailed description and characterization of their species is found in Timothy Zahn's trilogy. Selonians feature in the so-called [rather mediocre] Corellian Trilogy by I-forget-who, and are briefly mentioned in one of the _X-Wing_ series books. They are human-sized but weasel-like furry sentient aliens who, oddly, have a hive structure and social hierarchy not unlike bees.

Now that I have reached the halfway point in my tale, I figure I owe my dear readers, in addition to continued profound gratitude for the appreciation and encouragement, a mini-situation report. The remaining six chapters should, for the most part, be shorter but bigger on action / drama – I hope that the quality makes up for the quantity ;) Also, hope-wise, I hope to post the next chapter tomorrow but then have a red-eye flight to catch on Wednesday evening and will have slightly less time to write after that, so I may take a bit longer, say 2-3 days, between chapters; but in any case I hope to finish the story within the first week of January before work resumes [and becomes a bitch].

And rest assured, Cassian is not going to sit out the remainder of the plot in med bay :)


	7. shattered

Was going to do it tomorrow, but this chapter just sort of typed itself ;)

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They have failed.

The Alliance never got the plans they had transmitted. All the fighting, all the lives lost have been for nothing, Saw and her father and Baze and Malbus and Bodhi and all. It did not stop at Jedha City, or with the courageous Rebels sacrificing themselves on and above Scarif. Now millions of beings, an entire world, are gone, and it will not stop there, claiming dozens of planets, billions of lives… they have failed.

The pain suffocates her; it would have been easier if she could cry, but instead she is simply crushed by this mind-shattering defeat, by the prospect of unstoppable destruction. What are their lives worth, what good is fighting a war when death at Imperial hands is the only prospect whether they fight or not?

" _Liana?_ "

She is too distraught to be able to answer K's summons.

" _Jyn?_ "

This, she figures, is his way of expressing concern, and she has to at least show appreciation.

"Yes?" she breathes.

" _I have accessed the news feed and saw what happened to Alderaan. I am very sorry, Jyn, I am still confident that you and Cassian and the others did all you could to prevent it_."

She nods but cannot bring herself to answer. She knows K means well, but it is not helping.

"What's the matter?" a new voice, unexpected but infinitely familiar and desperately missed, sounds behind them.

She cannot answer him either, so it is left to K to relay the horrific news to his master.

She does not see Cassian's face, still staring ahead of her with an unseeing gaze, but she can hear the shock and anguish in his slow footsteps as he makes his way to where she sits in the pilot's chair. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she registers that at least there is one drop of good news amid this ocean of misery, that he is back on his feet and in good enough shape to walk. He leans over to the display to glance at the bulletin, then looks at her – and the pain welling up in his dark eyes somehow makes her own burden less unbearable.

He sits crouching down beside the pilot's chair and puts a hand on her shoulder; but this is not enough, and she turns toward him and tries to pull him up to sit beside her, even though there is no room. Instead, he sits down on the floor, leans back against the side console, and gently pulls her toward him.

"Come here."

She clambers down from the chair and sinks onto his chest, her face pressed into the crook of his neck, and even though the heartbreak is still tearing her up from the inside, she finds it easier to breathe.

She does not quite know how long they sit like that; she only knows that, by the time she sits up straight and looks at him and finds him looking back at her, she figures that she can probably just about go on to face tomorrow, and maybe another day after that.

"K's right," Cassian says quietly, "You did all you could. Even if you'd given up your life on Scarif it could not have achieved more."

"We shouldn't have stopped on Eadu," she whispers back, and instantly regrets it. That, and killing her father, had been part of his orders; he disobeyed the latter but was still compelled to stick through with the former. "Seeing my father meant the world to me, but if I'd known it would've made the difference for Alderaan, I would have agreed to give up that chance."

"We'll never know," he argues, still in the same soft voice. "We don't know what happened now to make them do it. Maybe if we hadn't got to Scarif when we did, but a day sooner, things would've happened that would have stopped us from ever getting those plans at all."

"I don't know if it matters," she sighs. "I don't think they got them."

"I'll call them tomorrow," Cassian assures her, "and ask them. And then we'll see what else we can do."

Assuming she makes it past tomorrow's bank job.

"What?"

She does not know how he has managed to notice whatever tiny change of expression may have reflected that thought of hers. But this is not the time to tell him about returning favours and setting explosives. He is still not fully recovered, and she does not want to burden his conscience with the thought that she is undertaking a risky task in exchange for his treatment. Or K's conscience for that matter, with the admission that she volunteered to take on a still-riskier task to get him back to his old metal self, sort of.

She shakes her head.

"It's just… " She remembers her earlier crushing thought. "I don't know how it's possible to find the strength to keep fighting after something like this."

He raises a hand to her face – she feels a flicker of relief to see that he is now fully in command of his left arm – and brushes a strand of hair behind her ear.

"So long as we're still breathing there's hope," he says quietly, and where a week earlier Jyn would have dismissed that sort of earnest rhetoric as high-flown and impractical, she finds herself clinging to his words now. "And so long as there's hope, we keep on fighting. No matter how heavy the losses, no matter how painful the blows, we fight against the odds until they turn in our favour."

And whatever the cynical Jyn of a week ago might have thought, right now she could swear that she has never heard anything as beautiful.

x x x

"Let's go," he finally entreats her, when a cursory look at a display readout alerts him to the local time. "In two hours it will be morning. You should get some sleep."

"And you?" she asks him as they scramble to their feet.

"I'm supposed to be getting back into the bacta tank first thing tomorrow – today. The 2-1B there is a real tyrant, you know," he adds with a hint of a smile.

"I know." Seeing his surprise, she explains: "I went to see you there and had to sweet-talk him into giving me five minutes."

He shakes his head. "And to think I missed all that."

"How did you get here, anyway?" she asks when they have said goodbye to K, locked down the shuttle, and are on their way out of the landing bay.

"Same way as you," he says, pointing to a second speeder bike now parked next to hers. "I woke up when the others were all getting ready for bed, and asked to get out of the med bay so I could take a walk around the compound. Ran into that pest of a 3PO…" he scowls and she smirks despite herself, "and asked him what you were up to, and when he said you had gone out on a bike and had not come back yet, I thought I might find you here and get the latest news." His face falls. "I had no idea what kind of news we'd be getting."

At least he similarly has no idea of what other errand she had been on before coming here.

"Let's hope," she says, struggling to suppress a sigh, "that whatever news you may get tomorrow will be better."

x x x

"So… I'll see you tomorrow, right?" he asks, making a valiant attempt at a smile that still comes out crooked. By now they are standing outside the door to her cabin, where he insisted on taking her before walking back to the med bay.

"Yeah…" She wishes she could explain to him that her dejected tone has a lot more to do with saying goodbye to him _now_ than with the nebulous prospect of seeing him tomorrow.

"What's wrong?"

Forget the Twi'leks' famed ability to read human faces; when it comes to the ability to read _her_ face, Cassian will give any Twi'lek a run for his money.

She shakes her head. "It's just…"

He takes a step back toward her and takes her hand. "I know. Listen… if you want to, I can stay here… until you fall asleep." Seeing, and misreading, the concern on her face, he adds, "I can be a gentleman, you know."

She shakes her head with a sort of broken chuckle. "That's not what I'm worried about." For that matter, had they both not been utterly heartbroken, she might _not_ have wanted him to be that much of a gentleman. "It's just that you'll have no time to sleep before your treatment."

"I can always start it later," he protests. "It's the last one anyway, makes no difference if it starts in the morning or afternoon, whatever the 2-1B says. Besides…" he cocks an eyebrow at her, "I can always sleep in the tank."

It strikes her then that keeping him awake a bit longer could actually be a good idea; with any luck, between the bacta and catching up on sleep, he will miss the whole data vault business, she figures as she does her best to keep the thought from registering in her face; instead, she looks up at him with a timid half-smile.

"OK."

x x x

She stirs awake and cannot immediately figure out where she is; though considering who she is next to, it does not really matter a single bit. It feels like the most natural and the most perfect thing in the world to be waking up with Cassian's arms wrapped around her, even if they fell asleep sitting against the back of the bunk and are by now leaning against it at an awkward angle. For a blissful few seconds she basks in the peace, the warmth, the closeness… until the heart-rending news of the previous night, and the business of the day before her, comes crashing down upon her. She glances over at the climate control panel and bites down on a curse; 07:43, just before mid-day local time, and just over an hour left before she is supposed to set off the vault explosion. And she just realised that there is an errand she _absolutely must_ complete before then.

Very slowly, careful not to wake him up, she slips from under his arm; he sighs but does not wake up. For a few more seconds she sits next to him looking at his face; not as blessedly carefree as the other day, but still peaceful in his sleep; and so damn handsome. She gets ready to get up and slip out of the room, but at the last instant, on an impulse, she presses the lightest of kisses to his lips – and while he does not stir, she is struck, as if by a bolt of lightning, by an overpowering desire to _really_ kiss him, no matter if he wakes up; to press their bodies together and forget the world outside–

 _Not now._

She has a debt to pay.

x x x

She actually wishes she could have kept K out of it.

She is back at the shuttle bridge in her mission gear, an explosives-laden satchel hanging off her shoulder and her speeder bike hovering outside on full power. In less than five minutes she will need to leave so as to make it to the vault in time to place the charges.

And she is damned if she can think of the right words.

" _What is it, Jyn?_ "

"K, I need you to… relay a message… from me, to Cassian… I have to… there's something I need to do today and it could get complicated… I should be back after sunset and I'll come by to let you know if it all goes well, but if I don't… if I'm not back by local midnight, then I'm asking you to give it to him the next time he's here."

" _Jyn, are you certain this cannot wait until you and Cassian have had a chance to talk?_ "

She nods in grave resignation. "I'm certain. The timing isn't my choice."

" _Are you certain that there is nothing I can do to help?_ "

She sighs instead of an answer. "It's OK. I should handle it just fine."

K pauses before prompting her. "What is the message you would like to leave?"

"Tell him I… I want him to stay safe, and I pray to the Force that he makes it back to… his friends… our friends", she stumbles, unable to say out loud what she wants him to know most of all. _Tell him I love him_. She knows it by now with overwhelming certainty, even though she never felt anything remotely akin to this for any of the handful of men she has known, but telling him that on the chance that she does not come back would be selfish, cruel almost; she would force him to live with her confession, and with the guilt he was bound to feel if he found out about the pact that had led her to this juncture. "That's it, really," she finishes limply instead.

If K has a bad feeling about this, he knows better than to say anything.

.

TBC

.

See you on the 30th or thereabouts :)


	8. alone

It looks like wild banthas cannot keep me away from writing this story; and there are certain benefits to being [almost] alone in an empty office...

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 _One down, four to go._

Carefully, her finger releases the detonator, and the tiny glowing light at its base comes on as she steps deftly away to her next chosen spot along the wall of the data vault. She re-ran the positions of the charges on her datapad at the cantina the previous evening, fine-tuning their positions based on the results of the scan to make sure the directional blasts did the maximum desired damage, fusing the metal and plastic of the databank storage inside at all the sensitive link-up points.

 _Two down, three to go._

The crucial part of her careful set-up is to make sure that the devices all go off simultaneously; that way, the cumulative damage is greater than the sum of single blasts. With that in mind, she has synched the detonators, programming them to go off a minute after the last one is set. This should give her plenty of time to sneak or, in the worst case, to run out of the alley, around either corner of the vault back into the cramped little square that the bank office is facing. Should she somehow become distracted, her in-ear comlink tag is synched to the same timer, sounding a series of ten warning beeps, one per second until the countdown is over.

 _Three down, two to go._

Before she left Nawara's compound on her way to the spaceport less than an hour earlier, she took the time to re-run a check on all the detonators, seeing that the electronics worked as expected and that the spark was released without fail. She even went so far as to take a grain of the plastic explosive she is now using and do a chemical probe to see that its composition and grade were exactly as labelled, so as to deliver the desired blast force. She checked that the in-ear comlink worked, asking both Malloc and Krey'lya to hail her from the far end of the hangar, and making certain that they both received the signal transmitting her position – her friend-or-foe identifier, of sorts; she would have to trust their marksmanship to spare her from being fired on, but she did what was in her power to ascertain that at least the technical side of it was glitch-free.

 _Four down, one to go._

She even tried to chat up the cantina waiter, doing her best to ignore his salacious insinuations about _what a pretty lady like her was doing in a place like that_ , to pry out as much information as she could about Imperial street patrols in the area under the innocent pretext of being concerned for the safety of her speeder bike parked nearby; and while that conversation on the whole was something she'd rather have done without, she was comforted to learn that the two-trooper foot patrols usually pass on their rounds no more than five times a day, three of which tend to fall on the night-time hours. And she made sure that she had now parked her bike on a relatively busy corner where it would arouse no suspicion.

She has considered every eventuality that came to mind, and double-checked every potential variable that was, to any extent, under her control.

Her finger releases the last detonator, the quiet click goes off, the tiny light comes on, and the countdown begins.

She picks up the empty satchel, glances around to ascertain that she has left nothing behind that is not supposed to be left behind, and heads out of the alley– "

"Halt!"

Her first incongruous thought is wondering why the trooper's barked command hits her in stereo. Must be the weird mountainous valley acoustics, she figures, as she turns to run in the opposite direction from the white figure with the blaster rifle – and belatedly understands the real reason when she sees the second trooper approaching her from the other end of the alley, rifle at the ready, a uniformed Imperial officer armed with a blaster pistol trailing behind him.

They close in on her, and she has nowhere left to run.

"Unidentified loiterer, state your name and show your identification," the first trooper demands, and her mind races to come up with a name that might magically see her out of trouble. The glaring irony is that her real name could do just that; but while revealing herself as Jyn Erso could go a long way to dispelling their immediate hostility, she stood no hope that they would simply let her go. They would march her out of here, unarmed as her blaster is back at the bike, and by the time they made it past the square at the front the explosions would go off, and she would be handcuffed and taken to the Imperial base for interrogation and detention.

"Liana Ha– Hallik," she stumbles.

"Identification?" the officer snaps.

"I left it– back at the– " If she acts contrite enough, perhaps she can persuade them to accompany her to the bike on the pretext of retrieving her ID… but even as the thought occurs to her, it is rendered moot by the reminder that the imminent explosion will reveal her crime to them long before they reach it.

Worst of all, they show no interest in budging from this spot.

And Nawara's lookouts are nowhere to be found, she muses darkly, belatedly remembering the silent comlink in her ear.

"What were you doing here?" is the officer's next question.

 _Preparing to blow this place to pieces, you pompous ass_. "I– I walked through here by mistake a little while ago and then I lost my comlink and I thought I'd dropped it back here so I came back looking– "

She realizes in the middle of this that her babbling will do nothing to help her get out alive. Her purpose this time is not to stall but to get as far away as possible from this spot, and the only way she would be likely to accomplish it is, in fact, by telling them what exactly is going on; and then when they make it out of the alley there will come the call for reinforcements and the quick trip to the Imperial detention block and torture sessions with interrogation droids, and the inevitable revelation somewhere down the line that she is really the rebellious Jyn Erso, and relentless attempts to extract information from her about her fellow Rebels and the location of their base. A Jedi might perhaps resist that, but she wishes she could trust her body that far.

She is out of options.

She will die here, in this dingy back alley, not incinerated by a planetary-scale explosion but blown to bits by puny explosive charges she herself planted. Had it not been for the sake of saving Cassian's life, she would have been better off dying on Scarif; at least the cause was a good deal more deserving.

Nawara has set her up for this; he and Naroon both have. They must have recalled the lookouts and tipped the Imperials off to her being here, or else they would have no reason to check this spot. All that talk at yesterday's meeting must have been the cover story they fed her; perhaps their real plan was not merely to avoid being linked to the explosion, but to finger her as a convenient offworld culprit and ingratiate themselves with Imperial authorities by virtue of their tip-off, even if they purposely let it arrive too late so as to still get their precious transaction records erased. All that _lekku_ -twitching at their meeting could have been the two of them mocking the gullible human stupid enough to have jumped into their carefully constructed net. And she is shot through with fresh dread thinking what this means for Cassian. She wishes she could warn him.

The comlink in her ear begins to beep its countdown.

.

TBC

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	9. pursuit

It is a strange sensation having my life hijacked by a fictional plot, but fun nonetheless :) Last bit before I take a mini-break, dear readers – or else I'll miss my tonight's flight!

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Mechanically, her mind registers the remaining seconds.

10

9

8

The thin red bolt of blaster fire lances past her so close that she almost jumps. In her peripheral vision she sees the trooper who had been standing to her right jolt and crumple; a second later, his counterpart meets a similar fate.

She was wrong about Nawara's lookouts, after all.

She does not wait to witness the officer's fate; by the time the third bolt meets its target she is already sprinting out of the alley, her lungs burning.

She is halfway across the square when the explosion goes off. She scrambles on, past the square and into the opening of the narrow street beyond, clinging to its flanking wall when the blast wave reaches her; she is well out of the damage radius, but the wall of hot air still hits her hard enough to make her stumble. She steadies herself and continues toward her getaway bike; by then her knees are weak but her mind is ablaze with a joyous tingle.

She made it.

By the time she has started up the bike and kicked the thrusters into gear, speeding away from the scene, she has to revise that conclusion when she hears the high-pitched wail of a siren a couple of hundred meters further up the slope.

She has been fortunate, and careful enough, not to have had any run-ins with the Dorvallan security force in all the time she spent here. The local Imperial garrison may be a relatively laid-back affair and local crime rates may be the laughing stock of places like Mos Eisley or Ord Mantell, but no place open to galactic space trade is completely immune from crime, and if popular opinion is to be believed, the local security officers have had a reputation for efficiency and tenacity from long before the Empire arrived. She certainly witnessed her fair share of lightning-fast arrest raids at the spaceport, and once even had to make a temporary detour to the forlorn-looking reserve spaceport further south due to a large-scale ambush they had laid out for a visiting criminal gang, none of whose members, she recalls, managed to escape. To be caught by one of Dorvalla's finest now that she is past the worst of it would be the height of irony, and a silly mistake she has no intention of committing.

Her first thought is to kill the thrusters and lie low. With any luck, the officer is not so much following her as trying to investigate the blast before his fellows arrive in force. But when she slows down a fraction while looking for a convenient side alley, she hears the siren apparently the same distance away.

Which means he is following her.

Her second best option, then, is to run. So long as she keeps moving, he will be compelled to follow, and speeding along narrow streets should be a harrowing enough task to take his full attention; with any luck, between staying on her trail and avoiding a lethal crash, he will have no chance to call reinforcements. Besides, by now surely the majority of his peers should be converging upon what was once the uptown office of First Imperial Bank.

And so long as he remains a lone pursuer, she still has a good fighting chance.

Keeping one of her hands on the steering handle, she reaches under the narrow hood for her concealed blaster – or rather Cassian's blaster she has requisitioned – and sticks it into her empty belt holster. If she can somehow lure him into following her on a loop and cut across to switch places with him, she may get the golden opportunity of putting him in her sights, and out of commission.

Trouble is, a loop trajectory is not exactly easy to conjure up in a city layout consisting almost exclusively of long parallel streets running along a mountain slope. And the whine of her thrusters echoing off the stone walls is bound to give her away should she try to veer into any of the steep connecting lanes in an attempt to reach the next street up or down.

Unless…

It is an insane idea, but it may be her best bet yet.

She takes a quick glance up the mountainside ahead of her, trying to gauge the location of the nearest water stream. There are dozens of them running down the slope; some of them are nearly vertical so as to be more akin to waterfalls. The parallel streets traverse them with sturdy stone bridges, leaving just enough of a gap between the corners of the adjoining walls and the gushing water below for her to make it onto either of the steep shrubbery-encrusted side slopes that would ease her descent to the water's edge. Steering a speeder bike above water is notoriously tricky, as the liquid surface tends to cancel out any attempt to make turns; but all she needs to do is take the bike straight up the stream far enough to exit onto a street above the one her pursuer is on. She could, conceivably, try to increase the distance between them by going down rather than up, but the thought of hurtling down a vertiginous incline over a treacherous surface makes her slightly nauseous.

And maybe her luck has taken a turn for the better after all, she figures, when she sees the narrow but impenetrably thick fog blanket start its descent down the mountain. In a few minutes and for the next half hour or so, it will be difficult to see more than a few meters ahead. The only slight downside is that her own progress might be easier to hear in the absence of traffic as locals wisely stay away from their bikes for the duration of the twice-daily foggy spells; but the benefit of concealment far outweighs it.

She pauses when she reaches the bridge, the full-on craziness of what she is about to do giving her momentary doubt; but the dogged siren wail spurs her on.

She eases off the throttle just long enough to cushion her jump down onto the slope by the side of the stream, then cranks it full up again to give the bike maximum power for the climb over the water.

The thrusters whine in protest, but climb she does; and unlike the amplified noise of going down a street, she finds herself moving quieter, if slower, as the noise is drowned out by rushing water.

She leans hard onto her left side to avoid smashing her head against the bridge upstream of the one where she left off; she cannot quite hear the siren over the surrounding water noise, but if her gauge on their relative moving positions is at all accurate, the officer must be following the next street up.

And presently she sees him cross the next bridge ahead, red light flashing on top of the standard-issue security-force bike hood in the thickening fog.

 _Gotcha_.

She slows down just enough to let him ride past the bridge, then guns the thrusters again until she is almost level with it. A mere five meters away, she steers the bike onto the slope and, ignoring the protesting engine, forces it further up until she is level with the street. With a slight jolt the bike leaps up onto the bridge, and she turns it around to go in the same direction as her erstwhile pursuer. She cannot see him in the foggy haze, but the siren sounds clearer as she closes in before abruptly cutting out.

A few seconds later the walled street widens into a narrow sort-of-square, and she sees him.

He has killed the siren and powered down the engine, no doubt perplexed by the disappearance of his quarry and trying to pick up her trail. Judging by the fact that he has flipped his bike around and is facing her, he must have been contemplating doubling back; maybe even abandoning the pursuit altogether. Had he done that earlier they could have happily gone their separate ways, but now that they are face-to-face, or rather helmet-to-helmet, albeit at a distance of ten meters, she is left with little choice.

She whips the blaster out of the holster the same instant she has stopped the bike, and fires a warning shot a hair's breadth above his head.

"I missed on purpose," she warns him, pleased to see that he was taken sufficiently unawares as not to have had the time to target her in turn. "My next shot will be on target."

He does not move.

She wonders momentarily what her next action should be, distantly berating herself for not having thought this through. She was kind of busy, true, but now she needs a quick way out of this impasse; she cannot forever continue the standoff, but is hesitant to shoot. Threaten him as she might, last time she heard, killing a security officer carried a minimum 20-standard-year prison term on Dorvalla, and she doubts that the punishment has grown any more lenient since. The best solution would be to stun him, but she is not familiar enough with Cassian's custom-tweaked blaster to know the setting change shortcut.

And then the idea hits her.

"Step away from your vehicle," she orders him, careful to keep him in her sights. Had the juncture been any less critical she would have been amused by the role reversal. "Keep your hands up where I can see them." Assuming that he stays reasonable, she might spare his life by ordering him a few steps away and shooting up his bike engine before making her escape.

He obeys, but just as he straightens up standing away from the bike, his left hand touches the side of the mirrored helmet. It could almost be taken for an accidental gesture, but Jyn is not so easily fooled. At best, he has activated an internal microphone that will let him call for backup. At worst, he may have keyed the remote activation for the bike-mounted guns.

Her finger tightens on the trigger.

.

TBC

.

PS I am very saddened by the news about Carrie Fisher. She was one of the great personalities I just thought would always be there, and just like David Bowie this past January, it is those always-be-there people whose loss is felt most keenly. This year just keeps on taking :'( …fingers crossed that the next one may be better.


	10. showdown

Before she can shoot, the mirrored visor of his helmet slides up, and the blaster falls out of her hand.

"Cassian– " she gasps, her mind a tumult of shock and relief.

Her first inkling that something might be off is when he shakes off the helmet and hangs it up on one of the bike handles by the chin strap, but does not make a move in her direction; so she is compelled to dismount and walk up to him. She suspects that the reason for his standoffishness must have something to do with the fact that he, an Intelligence operative and a trained assassin, has now found himself in her crosshairs, outsmarted by his quarry; but while that might explain a spot of wounded pride, it does nothing to explain his expression when she is close enough to take a good look.

He is absolutely white-hot furious.

She stops dead in her tracks a couple of meters from him, momentarily lost for words.

"What in the pits of Kessel are you doing?!" he lunges verbally at her, eyes blazing. "What in the Emperor's black name made you – "

… _made you hold me at blaster point_ , she mentally finishes for him. Well, if that's the only reason he is seething at her, it is easy to explain.

"I'm sorry I didn't know it was you, really – "

The effect of her words is the exact opposite of what she was hoping for.

"What the blazes are you talking about?!" By now he has finished seething and started _barking_. Compared to this, the way he berated her for branding him a Stormtrooper on board his U-wing a while back can be considered an endearment. "What were you thinking trying to get yourself blown up?!"

Well, she wasn't exactly going for that.

"I can explain – "

He still won't let her finish.

"Why didn't you bother to explain it _before_ you left on a suicide mission?" he snaps.

"Cassian, it wasn't _meant_ to be a suicide mission!" she protests. "I may have made a mistake trusting Nawara but I had no idea I'd get cornered the way it happened – "

She cuts herself off seeing how he has turned away and taken a couple of steps away from her. Is he going to _walk_ back to Nawara's, or to the spaceport, from here?

But then he stops and remains standing there, still facing away from her. By the time she is thinking about coming over to him, or at least calling out to him, he turns around and comes back in her direction; this time they are just a couple of paces apart when he speaks, and she is relieved to see that he looks less angry; or at least less _obviously_ angry.

"You were damn lucky I got there when I did," he growls at her.

So it wasn't Nawara's lookouts who shot the Imperials off her back. It figures, remembering the kind of lightning-fast lethal accuracy she saw those bolts fired with. Well, whatever chain of events brought about his fortuitous intervention, she is not inclined to argue this last point.

"How did you find out?" she asks, trying to steer him onto a less-contentious track of thought that will hopefully distract him enough to dispel some of that anger. "And how did you get – " she gestures to his security officer outfit and the regulation-issue bike, "all this?"

It works, to an extent. At least he does not snap at her immediately, but instead takes a second or two to collect his wits.

"I woke up in your quarters to see you gone," he starts, "and thought you were back at the spaceport looking at the news again." Makes sense, considering the terrible news they heard the night before; in fact, had she not been bound by obligation to stick to this near-disaster of a plan, that is exactly what she would have done. "And K told me you'd left a message for me."

 _Of_ _course_. Trust K, with his big mouth, to have spilled the beans in blatant disregard of her instructions to pass on the message only if she wasn't back by nightfall.

"So I went back to Nawara's place – he continues, at which point she really has to interject.

"You talked to Nawara?!"

"You bet I talked to Nawara," he says darkly, making her wonder what sort of bodily damage her former boss may have sustained in the encounter; but his next words surprise her. "By the time I got there he was trying to reach his man, the Devaronian he had sent to watch over you whose comlink had gone off, and when I – asked him – he told me about that plan of his." Maybe her initial guess was right after all, depending on what exactly the _asking_ involved. But the part about Nawara trying to reach Malloc is at odds with the betrayal scenario her mind had painted over the past half hour or so. Could it be Malloc's own initiative; but if so, why?

"Next thing I went out to ambush the guy I got all this from," Cassian continues, and once again she has to interrupt him.

"Do you happen to know that killing a Dorvallan security officer carries a twenty-year prison term if you're caught?" she reprimands him, trying to get back at him, just a little bit, for the dressing-down he has just given her.

But she is out of luck, after a fashion, though on balance it means that they both are kind of lucky.

"Unlike you," he grumbles, eyeing her with all the disdain he can muster up, "I don't always aim to shoot first and ask questions later in a strange situation. Not unless it's absolutely necessary," he adds. "I asked Nawara for a stun dart to shoot the officer with, and then hid him in an alley under the cliff near where he'd been sitting on his bike. He'll come around in a few hours none the wiser."

"What if you were caught impersonating a security officer?" she insists.

"What if you got yourself blown up?" he snaps, his hands tightening into fists before he forces himself back to a calmer state.

"That wasn't intentional," she argues, "unlike you switching on that siren bull blast – "

"What, you think that after firing three blaster bolts off the clifftop, I should have just come riding down and wait for the _real_ Dorvallan security, or better still, for the Imperials to arrest me?" he cuts in. "It was the only way to avert suspicion."

She is ready to kick herself; since the rancorous start of their encounter she was too eager to latch onto _something_ to criticize him for, to have seen the perfect reason in his choice.

Luckily for her, this time he lets it pass. "I got to the base of the cliff and was heading back to Nawara's, and then I heard another bike two streets down and by the time we'd been going in parallel for two minutes I knew it was you," he goes on; despite the tense exchange, she almost wants to smirk at the irony. "And then you were gone and by the time I'd stopped and tried to figure out what had happened you charged me here like a wild Bantha."

In a calmer situation, she might object to the comparison, considering that in her own mind she saw her cornering him – or the officer she had believed him to be – as an elegantly deft manoeuvre. But this is not the time to argue the fine points of semantics.

"And since your comlink was out of range, I couldn't hail you either," he finishes.

"What do you mean, out of range?" she protests. Surely with at least one of her supposed lookouts due to be on that same clifftop, she had to be in range of a comm hail from the distance Cassian was driving at.

"I mean out of range," he insists, not quite helpfully. "Let me see it."

She takes the bullet-shaped device out of her ear and hand it to him; and sees his face fall.

"Who gave you this?"

"Naroon, Nawara's deputy, right after we'd discussed the plan. I tested it with both lookouts and it worked. Why?

"It's a Merr-Somm SRR make 4," he explains; he is not being very helpful this time, either. But seeing her perplexed look, he relents. "It's a short range device, only works at a distance of about 50 meters."

Which was pretty much the maximum distance she could have tested it at, and _did_ test it at, back at the hangar.

So it had not been Nawara setting her up, after all.

And with Naroon having insisted on a second lookout sniper of his choosing, she now knows Malloc the Devaronian's likely fate.

No doubt Cassian has put the pieces together as well, arriving at the same conclusion. Strangely, he does not seem surprised.

"I figured it might be him after I'd talked to Nawara," he explains presently. "But I didn't have this past bit of info to be certain."

So perhaps Nawara made it through their encounter with both of his _lekku_ , and other vital appendages, still attached; and considering this latest revelation, it looks to be a good thing.

Unlike, for example, the fact that Cassian was supposed to have spent the day undergoing the crucial final bacta treatment, not careening down the streets of an unfamiliar city.

"If you two saw eye-to-eye on this after you'd talked, why didn't you get Nawara to send another of his men to cover me? I mean you were supposed to be – "

But this last part of her question is completely lost on its target audience.

"Great." The word sounds like the sharp crack of a high-voltage charge. "Next time you get in trouble, you pick whoever the blazes you want to get you out of it."

Before she can say another word, he is back on the bike and roaring off into the distance.

.

TBC

.

To anyone who may be tempted to Force-choke me for ending this on yet another quasi cliffhanger, I solemnly swear it was the last one.


	11. understanding

Her ride back is a desolate trundle amid incongruously beautiful surroundings, her mind lightyears away from the deep jade green evening sky, from the darkening gold-emerald-and-turquoise palette of the city slopes, with their greenish-yellow stone terraces strewn with a profusion of plants, even from the arresting spectacle of the lights coming on deeper down the valley, illuminating the fog blanket, now spread below her like a white sea, from underneath with radiant golden pools. Sightseeing has little to do with how she keeps checking her own progress; she tells herself that she needs to talk one-on-one with Nawara to clear the air, and there will be no chance of that until he has finished the communal dinner, but she knows the real reason. She is stalling for time, hoping to compose herself before she sets foot inside the hangar bay of Nawara's compound, and forcing herself to ignore the nagging thought that she has blown her chances with Cassian with a single silly line.

He is waiting for her at the hangar bay. She sees that he has lost the security officer's bike and uniform in the meantime, and she is left bemused at why he should be spending his time studying a discarded piece of landspeeder engine assembly; but the way his eyes latch onto her and track her as her bike enters the dimly lit hangar bay makes it blatantly clear that he has been waiting for her.

She fights a momentary spike of dread, certain that the only reason he would choose to do it would be to upbraid her some more for her reckless conduct, and unsure how much of that she could handle without it bruising her heart. By the time she descends from the bike she is resolved to pre-empt it with an abject apology; her motives may have been noble and her execution pretty good if she says so herself, but better declare herself in the wrong and get it over with than prolong this heart-wrenching standoff.

"Cassian, I'm sor– " she starts as she steps toward him.

By the time it would have taken her to finish the line, he has closed the distance between them and put his arms around her.

"It's all right," he mutters into her hair, warm breath caressing the top of her head. "It's all right."

And counter to all logic, the thing she is now in the greatest danger of is bursting into tears, albeit tears of happiness; and while she is struggling to contain this particular affliction, it falls to Cassian to deliver his share of an apology.

"I'm sorry I lost my temper." He cocks his head sideways to look her in the eye, and she has no choice but to bring her face up from his chest and take half a step back so as to be able to look at him. "It's just when K gave me your message at the shuttle I…" He shakes his head, and his hand comes up to cover his eyes; and no matter how cross his earlier outburst may have made her, she is now feeling guilty more than anything for putting him through this.

She puts her own hand on his wrist, pulling it down from his face. "I know I should have told you, but I thought it was more important that you should get well. That's why I said, I know it was a stupid thing to say, but that's what I meant when I said you should have let Nawara send someone else – "

He shakes his head at her, but there is no trace of the earlier anger. "Do you think I could have trusted anyone else in the galaxy to do it?"

"Even when I almost ended up shooting you?" she ventures, hoping for a sign that she has been forgiven for that particular transgression, too.

"Whatever. I'd do it again. I'd do it as many times as it takes."

She might not entirely agree with the sentiment, but his answer is hands down the most romantic thing she has heard to date. She is still holding his hand, and her fingers tighten unconsciously around it; his response is to bring up his other hand and hold her palm in both of his. She gazes up at him, into his gorgeous eyes shining amid the dim hangar, and he can probably see that her cheeks are burning, though it has nothing to do with embarrassment. By then the only thing maintaining a distance between them is the difference in height, and she wonders if she should wait for him to kiss her, as he surely must be about to, or just stand on tiptoe and go for it herself…

...when she hears clattering footsteps approaching them from inside the compound, followed by a tinny voice.

"Captain Rook – thank the stars!" the golden 3PO announces as he shuffles up to them.

She wants to disassemble him down to his tiniest constituent bolts, but he is blissfully oblivious.

"Two-Onebee has been trying to find you all day," he rattles on. "He gave me strict instructions to tell you to go back to the med bay for your final bacta treatment. I am _so_ glad I found you, sir!" It might be her imagination, but it sounds as if the evil creature were particularly pleased with the superb timing of his interruption.

She bites down on a muttered curse, reminding herself how important it is for Cassian to fully recover; his reaction, while courteous on the surface, has all the warmth of a death threat.

"Thank you," he grits through his teeth. "Thank you _very much indeed_."

He looks as if he were reluctant to leave, but seeing how the 3PO shows no sign of shoving off, he shakes his head at her, eyebrows raised in dramatic resignation, and walks away.

x x x

"Welcome, Liana. He is expecting you."

She is surprised when Shani herself greets her at the door to Nawara's quarters; even more surprised when this graceful vision of a Twi'lek inclines her head and then glides silently away into the private-side rooms, leaving her to make her own way forward toward the low light visible in the spacious lounge. Jyn is not quite sure what to make of this: is this a marked display of deference, or an ominous sign of a desire to deal with her quickly and quietly, keeping the knowledge of her visit in the family, as it were?

When she walks into the lounge and sees the low table in the middle of the dais set with food and drink, her unease dissipates. It is such a grave breach etiquette as to be virtually unheard-of for a Twi'lek host to betray his or her guests' trust over a meal said guests are invited to share.

Nawara stands up to greet her from his low cushioned seat on the dais, though he does not come forward, instead waiting until she has taken a seat opposite him.

"I am glad to see you came back safely, Liana," are his greetings words to her; said in an incongruously somber tone, they nonetheless go some way to confirming what she thinks – what she and Cassian both appear to think – about his role in the day's events being mostly above-board. "It is a pity you were not able to join us for our evening's meal, but I took the liberty of having these," he gestures to the assortment of dishes and a pitcher of what looks by its colour to be expensive Necr'ygor wine, "brought here for you to take refreshments."

"Thank you. I am grateful for you for your thoughtfulness," she amends herself, remembering to keep up with Nawara's formal tone. "I too am glad to be back alive and with my mission accomplished." She gives him a rather pointed look; as of this moment, she is still not completely sure if both outcomes came about thank to, rather than despite, any efforts on Nawara's part.

"You have accomplished it in more ways than one," Nawara purrs cryptically, then gestures for her to take advantage of the food and wine. As she picks the food onto her plate, he continues. "It happens that your arrival on Dorvalla happened at an… interesting juncture. I am pleased to say that it has now been resolved," he adds, though his dark tone is still at odds with the upbeat words.

He takes a pause, ostensibly to pour himself a glass of wine, but she has the distinct impression that he is stalling. Whatever his reasons, it is not in her interest to force his hand right now.

The wine appears to seal his resolve. "I introduced Naroon to you as my deputy." His glowing eyes darken. "What I did not tell you was that he was my nephew."

As she processes this surprising bit of information, she wonders if the second _was_ in Nawara's wording is merely down to his rigid observance of Basic grammar rules, or reflects a more ominous truth. Considering what she knows as of earlier this afternoon about Naroon's treatment of her, she is not overly concerned about his life and safety; she may be vaguely curious but she knows she should not ask, and is not particularly inclined to care.

"He came to see me here two standard years ago after his father, my elder brother, died back on Ryloth," Nawara continues. "He expressed a strong desire to work for me, and said that the only thing that had been stopping him prior to that was the old feud between me and my brothers, including Figrin. He seemed to have heard quite a lot about my business here and expressed his admiration of it, and of my business methods, in no uncertain words, and I confess I was won over by the flattery, and since my daughters are both married away from home and are too much like their mother to be interested in business and trade, I was tempted to see him as a kind of surrogate son." His eyes grow so dark as to almost completely lose their orange glow. "It was a mistake I almost paid a very high price for."

 _You tell me about it_. She does her best to keep her face impassive, however; this must be a hard enough confession for him to make so as for her not to make it worse by verbal, or even mental barbs at his expense.

"For the first year following his arrival, he was impeccably diligent and very eager to learn all the workings. I put it down to his desire to progress within my business outfit, and seeing his hard work I gave him the benefit of the doubt by appointing him as my deputy, even if his experience did not yet fully justify it. But as I later began to suspect, his desire to learn the ropes, as it were, was a means to a different end, that of supplanting me as the head and owner of my business."

The little shit, she thinks; Nawara may have his shortcomings, and may be cunning and tenacious, but to quote an ancient saying from Naboo, that weaselly grey-skinned youngster could not hold a candle to his uncle.

"I noticed at first that he had funneled away small amounts of funds, no more than a few thousand credit at a time, on a couple of occasions. Once again I gave him the benefit of the doubt thinking that perhaps he had an obligation to support his relatives, my brother's widow and his siblings, back on Ryloth and was too embarrassed to ask me for help in view of the old feud. But then I started to notice him breaking into my files and records, looking for information beyond what he already had access to as my deputy, and I knew almost for certain that his motives had little or nothing to do with helping his family and everything to do with overthrowing my authority."

" _Almost_ for certain?" she questions. What Nawara just said sounds pretty definitive to her.

He hesitates for a split second. "Let us say I wanted to give him one more chance to prove himself, that would otherwise leave him with enough ammunition to shoot himself." She wonders if that is what literally happened to Naroon; for all their cunning, Twi'leks have a rather strict honour code.

"And this heist was that chance?" she ventures.

Nawara inclines his head. "Precisely."

"And I was the bullseye painted in the crosshairs," she cannot help quipping.

His eyes flash. "You were not _supposed_ to be in the crosshairs. You may recall that the role I originally proposed to you was to remotely manipulate the droid that planted explosives, and it was only your desire to discuss the matter of the K-2SO body that led to you taking the droid's place."

Now that the day's trials are over and the truth is finally laid bare before her, she can almost laugh at how she managed to stumble into the middle of what she now sees to be a mutual set-up between two very wily players.

"When you arrived, again given the timing, I could not quite rule out that you were working with Naroon, even though I saw no indication of the two of you having any prior knowledge of each other when you met on our way from the spaceport." So that's what Naroon's silent presence in the landspeeder was about. "But I only saw the final proof when you volunteered for a task that was considerably more dangerous than what I had proposed, whereas the less risky one would have sufficed to sabotage the mission… and when Naroon began to quite obviously try to trip you up."

"You know about the comlink?"

"I know now; your partner, Cassian, told Kardue, my bodyguard who picked him up at the spot where he left the security scooter to come back here, and Kardue told me over dinner." So that is how Cassian managed to lose the bike; of course he was too smart to have ridden a security forces vehicle, doubtless equipped with a built-in tracker, into Nawara's hangar. She wonders vaguely at Nawara's use of _partner_ rather than _pilot_ as she herself had described Cassian to him; surely he did not let slip anything concerning the circumstances of their previous mission in the heat of the moment? One way or the other, she feels a treacherous blush creep up her cheeks and hopes that Nawara puts it down to the effect of the wine.

"But what had sounded the first alarm bell," Nawara continues, cutting short her musings, "was his mention of wanting to use a Treadwell to plant explosives. You and I both know, as undoubtedly did he, that it could not carry sufficient charges to guarantee the destruction of the vault, at least not to carry them concealed. It meant that he either wanted the vault to retain some if not all of the data in the explosion, or that he wanted the droid to be apprehended if it carried the extra charges in the open, purposely implanting it with data that could trace it to me."

She can see how Naroon's treacherous aims could be served by directly implicating his uncle, but what about a failed explosion? "Why would he want any part of the vault data to remain intact?"

"My suspicion is that he may have set up an alternative chain of transactions," Nawara says slowly. "My financial expert, the Selonian you saw at our dinners, is working through the records now to see if that was the case, but I believe that he may have planned to use the same backdoor vulnerability at the bank to insert records registering the transfer of control of my company's assets in his name. So regardless of whether he profited from our original plan – which he would not if the vault was not destroyed – he would still achieve his main objective of undermining me and taking over my business. And if he then purposely exposed our previously-added duplicate transactions to the Imperials and thus sealed my fate, I suppose in his mind it would have made his victory complete. I could tell that he was very unhappy when you took the droid's place, but I suppose he then made the most of it by likely tipping the Imperial troopers to your planting of the explosives."

On second thoughts, she rather _hopes_ Naroon has met a grisly end.

"How did he manage to orchestrate all this on his own?" she wonders aloud. By then, she has finished her dinner and they are standing at the wraparound transparisteel window looking at the city lights. She feels wide awake, but can tell that her host is ready to retire; the time is already pushing Dorvallan bedtime.

Nawara's eyes flash. "He did not. Krey'lya, the Bothan who he proposed as the second lookout, was working with him. He probably promised him a deputy position." Naroon's growling voice is dripping with contempt as he says it. "I did not learn of Krey'lya's involvement until our meeting, and even then was not completely certain. I thought it was merely Naroon's way to leave you with only one effective lookout, as Bothans as a race are by and large opposed to killing." Which means that he would not shoot even if it became necessary. She wishes she had known this earlier. "But in Krey'lya's case, it did not stop him from shooting Malloc in the back after they left here to take their respective positions." Nawara's eyes darken. "He tried to run afterwards but Kardue took care of that. Malloc was a good guard, too good to be lost like this. I trusted him well enough to know that once he had gone silent, it could not mean treachery on his part but likely meant that he was dead or incapacitated. And just as I was about to send a replacement lookout to take his place, Captain Rook found me here and was… very persuasive about taking Malloc's place."

This time, she cannot help smiling.

"Which reminds, me," Nawara goes on, "I have something for the two of you. Consider this the least I can do to repay you for your help." He motions for her to go out of the lounge, back toward the main foyer. Once there, he opens a sliding partition to reveal a repulsorlift pallet with a K-2S0 body resting on it; it looks brand new.

"I am very grateful," she says when she is done grinning.

"The gratitude is all mine," Nawara assures her, inclining his head so low as to resemble a bow. This, coming from an elder Twi'lek toward another species, is a sign of considerable respect, she remembers. "And if you and Captain Rook would consider staying here to work for me," he continues as he walks her toward the door, "it will be my pleasure to keep you both busy."

A week ago, she would have jumped at the offer.

"Thank you." She tries to mirror his head-incline gesture as best she can. "We are both greatly honoured, but we have to get back to… friends who need us."

"I can see how anyone who knows you well will consider you both valuable assets," he assures her. "But I would ask you to keep my offer in mind should you ever change your minds."

She is not sure why Nawara thinks that she and Cassian should both change their minds simultaneously, but now is not the time or the occasion to ask him; not when she is already outside the door with Nawara's precious present nodding her goodbyes to him.

She walks away, aware that for some reason he is standing in the doorway. Still, his seemingly offhand parting shot, by the time she is ten paces away, is so unexpected as to make her heart leap into her throat.

"He loves you too, you know."

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To be concluded

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For anyone who has read Timothy Zahn's trilogy, my portrayal of Bothans will likely come as no surprise. For the benefit of other readers, I should explain that despite their implied heroic role in discovering the location of the second Death Star in _Return of the Jedi_ , EU canon has them as ambitious, backstabbing political players.

I am pretty sure that _Empire Strikes Back_ fans among you – and seriously, what Star Wars fan _isn't_? – will pick up on the couple of bits I [stole] borrowed from Han and Leia's antics in the asteroid belt. In my defence, I invoke _the sincerest form of flattery_ ;)


	12. hope triumphant

Happy New Year!

As I bring you the conclusion of this tale by way of new year's greetings, I want to thank all the readers from all my heart for having taken the time to read, provide encouragement, and express appreciation. Writing this story has been really exhilarating, and having people come along for the ride, and seeing that they have fun along the way, is absolutely priceless.

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"Hello, Jyn."

She tries not to show that she is somewhat taken aback by his matter-of-fact greeting when she boards the shuttle with the repulsorlift crate in tow. True, he gets out of the pilot's chair when she reaches the bridge, but he makes no move to walk over to her, let alone make any display of affection.

She wonders if this has anything to do with her relatively late arrival on board the shuttle; her excitement the night before, between the events of the day and Nawara's revelations and recalling the details of her talk with Cassian in the hangar bay, took quite a while to subside, keeping her awake into the early hours and making her sleep until the local mid-day. Then again, it looks like Cassian has not been on board that long, either, seeing how the systems are still finishing the functional check sequence; and in any case, they have to wait to hear from Nawara, who promised to get them departure clearance as one of Starfire Electronics cargo shuttles to avoid any inquiries, before they can take off.

"What's that?" Cassian asks, seeing how Jyn has brought new cargo.

"K, are you listening?" she asks instead of replying.

" _Yes, I am listening. Hello, Jyn_." His greeting, for all its monotone, almost sounds more animated than Cassian's.

"You may be interested to know that I have managed to get you a brand new body. A new _K-2SO_ body," she adds, remembering Cassian's threat a few days ago.

For a second it seems that K is lost for words. " _Human language cannot describe the full extent of my gratitude, Jyn_ ," he says when he has regained his capacity for speech. " _As soon as I have my faculties back I will make you a fractal drawing that might come close to expressing it_."

She can barely contain her happy grin. "I'll look forward to it."

Cassian, she notes, likewise has his spirits lifted for a moment, if his pleasantly surprised look is any indication; but it does not take long before he decides to play the spoilsport. "Where did you get it?"

"It was a gift from Nawara," she explains. Best leave out the part where she volunteered to plant the explosives to get it.

"I trust him well enough," Cassian muses out loud, "but it's still a good idea to run a check on this droid's systems and circuits and make sure its memory is fully wiped, better re-format it again just to be sure. You never know how it got into Nawara's hands and what scraps of code it may have lurking in its head."

"Sure, I was about to do that." She was; but it does not make Cassian's businesslike tone any less of a letdown. Nawara must have misread him; _she_ must have misread him, but then again, it should not be surprising when dealing with a career spy. His romantic frame of mind the other day must have been due to extraordinary circumstances, and now things are back to normal - whatever passes for _normal_ in their lives - he must have forgotten all about it.

She understands some of his preoccupation when she chances a look at the primary display just before she leaves the bridge and sees that he is keying up a comm channel; and judging by K's silence, in all likelihood they are patching together a scrambled channel to Alliance HQ. It strikes her that of course Cassian had no chance to do it yesterday as he had intended, what between confronting Nawara and shooting troopers off her back and the final bacta treatment. No wonder he is acting tense; who knows what new atrocity the Empire may have committed in the meantime? For all they know, in the past day while they were incommunicado, the Death Star may have reached and destroyed their Yavin IV base.

Still, as she sets about unpacking the crate containing the K-2SO body and picks out the fine-gauge spanners to unscrew the back of its head, she catches herself wishing Cassian would be less reserved around her. She feels like she has known him forever by now, and at the same time as if she hardly knew him at all; she knows the key facts about his life but still has a long way before she can figure out his character, assuming she ever gets the chance. For all she knows, he might be regretting his uncharacteristically sweet conduct with her these past couple of days as a momentary weakness. She lowers the repulsorlift pallet to the floor, sits down beside the droid carcass, lifts off the metal plate hiding the circuits inside the K-2SO's metal cranium and looks for the internal power and reset switches…

"Jyn!"

She instantly springs to her feet at hearing this summons. It hits her that he would hardly call out to her in such an excited voice all across the shuttle if he were to deliver bad tidings; but before she can join him on the bridge and find out the reason, she sees him standing at the hatch connecting the passage from the bridge with the cargo hold, and her breath catches in her throat.

If she thought she had seen Cassian at his happiest back when he was asleep in the med bay, she has to instantly revise that opinion. It is not just that he looks radiant; he looks totally unguarded; devastatingly handsome and absolutely irresistible.

"They did it… they blew it up!"

She does not need to ask him what _it_ is.

She takes a step toward him, and seeing all the pent-up tenderness and joy and gratitude and love, and hope fulfilled, mirrored in those magnificent eyes, she feels like she is flying - though it probably looks more like she is stumbling - into his open arms; and this time there is nothing and no one in the entire galaxy that can stop her from kissing him like the world is ending... or rather, like it has just begun anew.

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 **epilogue**

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"I love you."

"I know," she answers with her most beatific smile before punctuating her reply with the lightest of kisses. What a way to wake up, wrapped in his arms and gazing at each other, no matter that they are lying on the durasteel shuttle floor.

His response is to hold her tighter, and as her eyes flutter closed with a contented sigh it occurs to her that she finally does know beyond the shadow of a doubt; and that had she been savvier in matters of the heart she would have probably seen it staring her in the face all this time. But then, all that matters is that they are here now.

By the time he is kissing her back she starts wondering if she can survive this kind of a mind-shattering, supernova-blast experience a third time with her sanity intact and her vocal cords still functioning; by the time his lips and tongue start doing wicked things to her neck she is happy to go for it regardless, when their blissful reverie is interrupted by a highly incongruous sound for a stationary ship.

...the realspace re-entry alert.

She is momentarily confused, but Cassian appears to take it perfectly in stride; relatively speaking at least: he props himself up on one elbow with a rather spectacular eye-roll.

"You should have got him a 3PO body, seriously," he mutters as he stands up, keys open the hatch he shut just before they sank to the floor, and wanders off toward the bridge. She wonders how he has managed to still have most of his clothes on, no matter how dishevelled; unlike her who ended up flinging hers all over the cargo hold floor and has to scramble to retrieve them now that she no longer has Cassian to keep her warm.

He is back at the hatch before she has had a chance to join him and K at the bridge. Instead of picking either of their mutually opposing destinations, they stay at the hatchway, and it only takes a second for him to put his arms around her again as she leans into him. She has one arm wrapped around his shoulders, and with her free hand she gently brushes away the fringe from his forehead, again struck by how much less serious and how much sweeter he looks; the fringe must be his way of making himself look more menacing, for sure.

"What did he want?" she asks, trying to collect her scattered thoughts, referring back to the unusual summons K gave them.

"To tell me we have the departure clearance," Cassian replies with a smirk, "and to give me a piece of his mind for running off without warning and sealing shut the cargo hold hatch."

"Why did you have to do that?" She was too busy to have given it much thought when he did it, but in retrospect, it was a baffling thing to do.

Whatever Cassian's motive may have been, his reaction surprises her; despite the low light, she could swear he is blushing.

"Based on experience." Seeing her expectant eyes, he adds, "The less said about it the better."

When she still makes no sign of relenting in her curiosity, making big round eyes at him, he is forced to give in.

"I was once in a... similar situation... well, nothing as amazing as this but, well, similar, when he was in a room down a hallway in full power mode. And afterwards he tried to give me a blow-by-blow commentary… he has surprisingly acute hearing," Cassian finishes amid her uncontrollable snickering.

As if to prove the incontrovertible truth of Cassian's words, K pipes up from the bridge.

" _Commentary on_ what?"

Cassian tries to roll his eyes again, but gives up and just laughs.

x x x

"Three... two... one... _go_."

This time it fell to K to deliver the countdown on their departure from Dorvalla, and to Cassian to pull the lever engaging the hyperspace drive. She watches the brilliant starburst with a sense of _deja vu_ ; just over two standard days ago, they blasted away from Scarif bound for parts unknown, with the only certainty being that they had survived for the moment, and stubborn hope the only thing still keeping them alive.

By now she has seen this stubborn, crazy hope triumph over the odds, for the two of them and for their fellow Rebels alike. They must be celebrating their victory on Yavin now; the two of them will likely miss the official ceremony and the medal awards to the bravest fighters, but knowing Cassian she doubts he cares about getting a medal and knowing herself, she has her reward already.

She is too lost in thought to have seen Cassian making eyes at her, and comes back to the present with a start when he tugs at her shirt sleeve.

"What?"

She cannot figure out why, having accomplished his goal of getting her attention, he looks annoyed, but when she sees him tip his head in the direction of the cargo hold - and more importantly, in the direction of the pilot's sleeping quarters flanking it - the understanding dawns... but by then it is too late. Try as they might to make the least possible amount of noise sneaking out, it takes no more than two seconds for K to catch them.

" _And where do you think you are off to?_ " the mechanical voice demands.

"We have things to do." Cassian does his best to sound deadpan.

K wastes no time calling his bluff.

" _Could you please be more specific?_ "

Seeing Jyn blush, Cassian does not bother to satisfy K's curiosity, instead addressing her.

"Ignore him. He's just being jealous."

" _It is not in my programming_ ," K argues.

"Nor is being a smartmouth," Cassian shoots back, "and here you are. We really have things to do," he repeats, in a more conciliatory tone.

K is not swayed, however. " _And when do you think you will be done?_ "

If Cassian's expression is any indication, he does his best to bite down on a snarky response. "We'll make sure to come back here before landing, K."

" _That's_ seven hoursand forty two minutes _away, and all the time while you enjoy the… rest and recreation I'll be here keeping watch._ " K's still-monotone voice is oddly suited to this sort of nagging, she muses.

Cassian puts a hand over his eyes in silent exasperation, but Jyn does her best to make amends for both of them.

"K, we really appreciate your running things here while we're busy. And I promise you'll get plenty of R&R, not to mention your new body, when we get home," she assures him before she follows Cassian off the bridge.

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 _fin_

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Anyone who may have expected a more detailed account of how exactly they, well, _celebrated_ the Rebel victory has my profound apologies. I am capable of writing smut in principle, and have done so on occasion in a couple of my previous fandoms before I posted fics on AO3, [and have very specific mental images of what exactly they do after I chicken out into the fade-to-black cuts], but I have an absurd hang-up about my beloved fictional characters' privacy. And the what-goes-where stuff would have been out of tune with the rest of the plot.

For anyone who may [doubt that I am a major nerd] wonder how my timeline stacks up against _A New Hope_ aka Episode IV, I can confirm that my plot is timed to pretty much exactly overlap with that of _Hope_ (I assume both to take about 2.5 "standard", i.e. 24-hour days), and can offer the following plot timeline summary that I had to put together after I arbitrarily but fortuitously decided to give Dorvalla its crazy short days. The times below are in "standard" hours starting from the time they set off from Scarif (0); the lines in italics refer to "normal" Dorvallan night-time (their 12-hour days are basically 0-4 night, 4-12 morning/day/evening, 12-16 night, 16-24 morning/day/evening).

 **.**

 **Timeline**

0 Jyn, Cassian and K escape from Scarif

8 they arrive on Dorvalla (mid-day local time)

9-11 Jyn talks to Nawara followed by dinner

 _12-16 others sleep, Jyn wakes up two hours late (ca 18)_

19-21 Jyn checks on Cassian at the med bay, then walks / rides bike around town

22-24 dinner

 _24-28 – others sleep and Jyn goes to the shuttle to charge the power cells and tweak K's interface_

29-31 heist prep meeting with Nawara and Naroon

32-33 Jyn goes back to town to scope out the vault

34-36 others have dinner; Jyn has a snack in town

 _36-40 – others sleep, Jyn goes to the shuttle and gets the news about Alderaan (37); Cassian finds her on board the shuttle_

38-44 – they sit in her cabin and doze off ca 39 (others wake up 40)

44 Jyn wakes up early afternoon local time and leaves on her mission ca 45

45½ heist goes wrong

46 she corners Cassian and they argue

46½-47 they go back and talk at the hangar bay

47-48 Jyn talks to Nawara after the others have had dinner

 _48-52 others sleep, Jyn goes to sleep and wakes up later (50-56)_

58 Jyn goes to the shuttle in the afternoon and they find out re the Battle of Yavin; leave Dorvalla ca 60

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And that's it, my dear readers. May the new year bring you only good news, and may the Force be with you!

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PS

I have some of you to [blame] thank for putting the notion of a sequel into my head. I always approach writing a fic thinking it will be my last as I will exhaust my plot ideas on it; having proven myself wrong a few times I learned to _never say never_ , and this time, like in other fandoms before, the wish to spend more time with these characters and readers alike has led me once more onto the path of temptation.

I have the plot of my next foray summed up and will put up the intro chapter in a day or two, but the rest will have to wait for mid-January onwards when I am back to where my Star Wars books are as I need to do a good deal of background rehash. Anyway, if you see me post something called _In Living Memory_ , you will know what it is and who is in it ;)

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